March 3rd, 2008
by
the angry black woman
via John Klima and SF Awards Watch, the World Fantasy Award judges are:
- Peter Coleborn
- Robert Hoge
- Dennis L. McKiernan
- Mark Morris
- Steve Pasechnick
My first reaction upon seeing this wasn’t “Let me get my published materials to them right away!” it was, as the title indicates: ALL men? AGAIN? Really? sigh.
Before everyone jumps down my damn throat yelling about how these are all excellent judges and very smart about fantasy literature and blah blah blah, let me just stop you. I am sure all of these guys are great. I’m sure they will be fine judges, just as with last year’s all male panel. But it still raises the question: aren’t there any women of similar background, knowledge, interest or experience that could be tapped for this? Or are they all too busy off having babies?
And, oh look, they are also all white! (Unless Steve Pasechnick is not — I couldn’t find a picture of him.) So we have a group of people who are all white and male in charge of picking the best fantasy stories and novels of 2007. Well, at least some aren’t American. We can give them that…
Look, I’m not saying that a group of white guys can’t judge the World Fantasy Awards properly. Again, I am sure they are great. But it is 2008, people. 2008 and the arbiters of what is best are still a bunch of white men.
Looking forward to November! *thumbs up!*
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Filed under Awards & Recognition, Writers & Artists | Comments (35)
Pasechnick is white.
Who’s responsible for choosing the judges?
It is kind of depressing, isn’t it. But then again on the same day we announced the PKD Award judges for 2009. The jury comprises two white men, two white women, and our good friend Mr. Buckell. Sometimes the glass is half full.
By the way, I don’t know for certain who appoints the PKD judges, but it would seem logical that it would be the award administrators. That would be those two notorious white male sexists, David Hartwell and Gordon Van Gelder.
I’m not sure how official it was, but I was asked if I wanted to judge, by one of last year’s judges but I laughed at him because I’m too busy. At the time he said that they had trouble finding judges for exactly that reason.
I’m not saying that makes a homogeneous list a good thing or that they couldn’t have tried harder, but it might be good to start trying to convince a diverse crowd to actively volunteer for next year.
Awards Administration: Peter D. Pautz with John R. Douglas, Jo Fletcher, David G. Hartwell, and Rodger Turner. I believe also that the previous judges also assist, but I’ll check.
Not particularly defending anyone but it is very difficult to find judges, mind you, people willing to devote that much time and energy to doing so. Or at least I found this to be the case from what I’ve heard, with International Horror Guild and The Shirley Jackson Awards. It can be difficult for other award systems, and the fact that they did approach Mary shows that they did outreach to female candidates, but that they probably all turned down the chance. What do you do in that instance?
It would depend, I think, on how hard they tried to find folks who are non-white and non-male. Obviously if you ask 100 people and only 5 say yes, you kinda have to go with those five. And judging something this big is obviously not to be taken lightly.
I wonder if we’ll get to know who they asked and who turned it down for whatever reason?
I am a cynic, so my inclination isn’t to assume that they asked a lot of non-white and non-male people. If the extent of their asking was to tap a person very obviously incredibly busy, I’m going to be mad.
It’s probably a bit weird if only because it’s two years running, and because it’s been over twenty years (1988) since World Fantasy has not not had a female judge in place. I wouldn’t worry, particularly, unless it goes on for another year . . . at which point you can go Hulk on them :p
ha! Well, I can buy that it’s an aberration these two years as regards the lack of women. But what’s the breakdown on people of color? (feel free to point me to a link where I can investigate this myself. Are the past judges listed on the wfc site?)
Yes. http://www.worldfantasy.org/awards/awardslist.html I can’t help further.
Looking through the list back to 1980, I’m not seeing many folks I recognize as POC. Anyone care to enlighten me on that?
Can’t see any obvious POCs, but I did notice several years where 3 out of the 5 judges were women.
It is worth noting that being a World Fantasy judge is a pretty demanding task. You have to read one heck of a lot of books. Probably more than any other judging job in the community. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to discover that a lot of people turn the job down.
At the risk of provoking mad gales of laughter… Are the judges paid for their time? Because one way of attracting a more diverse slate of judges while encouraging greater scrutiny of the judge-selection process would be to make it more than just an honor to serve.
As for where you’d get the money, maybe somebody can go barhopping with J.K. Rowling.
Matt: they get an awful lot of free books…
Seriously though, I believe that the judges for the Booker get some sort of financial recompense for their time, but even then it really isn’t an economic proposition.
I wonder if we’ll ever know how many non-white/non-male folks were asked and declined? But it’s been my experience as a black woman that, very often, when the result of a search turns up nothing but white males, it indicates that the search wasn’t that wide or exhaustive. I’m willing to entertain the notion that I am wrong in this instance, but considering the genre’s problems with race and gender, my cynicism is tuned up to 11.
Economic factors might also play into it — who’s got the leisure and economic cushion to be able to devote all that time to judging duties, as opposed to the people who are working another job and writing in their not-so-spare time.
They did ask a lot of women (like MRK) who turned them down this year. It is a pretty miserable job.
You’d love the Croatian national SF award – it has abut 25% female winners, which no other Croatian literary award has. And yes, about 1/4 of Croatian SF writers are women. Two of the most famouse male editors call the women the quiet hope of Croatian SF, claiming that, as far as Croatian genre is concerned, female authors even though they write less, write better! The jury is between 5 and 7 people, with women in the majority.
About 1/5 of our fandom are women. But, the president, vicepresident and secretary of the oldest SF society are female. The biggest and oldest Croatian SF con – SFeraKon is run by women, down to the female chief of security! And would you believe it – all of it quite by accident! None of even noticed until we were queried for a feminist study!
To Mihaela:
This is veering somewhat off-topic, but: I’d find it interesting to hear more about Croatian SF & the status of women in genre there. Do you think you’d like to contribute info about writers, fans, organisers, etc. to the Feminist SF Wiki? Or pass on the link if the idea of contributing to it might appeal to feminist Croatian fen? I’m aware that there is the matter of language differences creating obstacles to communication and the political ramifications of privileging communication in the tongues of dominant populations; not being a native anglophone myself.
Also, (while I have no statistical data on this) unfortunately, it seems to me that women’s active positions in the running of science-fiction conventions may not necessarily reflect a favourable status within SF communities. From my own limited experience with conventions, the work that I’ve seen women do, even in positions of leadership, in non-profit, fan-run conventions in particular, is on the lower end of the prestige scale: because it is volunteer work, unpaid or underpaid work, grunt work, administrative and service work, and, as a matter of logistics, usually prevents those who perform it from enjoying the events which take place at those conventions because they’re busy acting as managers to the guests (who get the honours). (Furthermore, when the paying clients and/or members of conventions and SF societies are majoritarily male, that can also create demands on women in managing positions which could prevent them from exerting their administrative powers at their own discretion.)
Which ties into what Ellen Kushner said above about judging being “a pretty miserable job”, and Marie Brennan’s remarks on the economics of having the leisure to do the judging, also. (From a fan’s perspective, time and money also place barriers on the ability to read material that can be qualified for those awards.)
To be honest, I don’t care about the gender, race, religion of the writer when I read fiction. It doesn’t matter who writes it — what matters is what’s written.
Ide Cyan: From my own limited experience Couldn’t you have just left it at that? Or if you do want to play victim, could you please do so in a way that isn’t quite so insulting to the many women who have held senior management roles in all sorts of conventions from Worldcon on downwards.
WHM – thanks so much for adding absolutely nothing to the conversation and being cliched all at once! We LOVE it when folks around here do that.
Love, I say.
I wasn’t officially approached, but more than one of the judges from last year told me I should ask David to consider me. I sort of scoffed at this–I couldn’t imagine having enough free reading time to do the award justice–but I can imagine many people being in similar straits.
One thing I could imagine helping is if there was, say, a wiki (say, diversewfajudges.pbwiki.com) where people who would gladly serve could sign in and add their name, contact info, a sentence or two about their qualifications (books/stories published, jobs held, etc.), and–if they wished–a line about how they could broaden the scope of the judging pool (not just race and gender, but class, sexual identity, nationality, etc.). If such a list existed, I don’t think it would be untoward to call it to the attention of the awards administrators each December. Or am I completely nuts?
if there was, say, a wiki
Uh oh. I feel a disturbance in the Force.
Seriously though, Anne and I could do something like that (though it would have to take its place in the queue). However, experience suggests that award administrators can be rather stuffy about who they regard as suitably qualified. I just can’t see the WF Board being happy to consider someone just because they had volunteered. And I suspect a whole lot of people would volunteer and never get asked, which would lead to people getting upset.
A wiki of people who had been judges would be another matter, but that wouldn’t necessarily help stop Tempest being angry.
Nothing can stop me being angry! raaarrrrr
That said, I think both Liz and Cheryl have a good point. With a wiki, any old person can throw up some qualifications, but how many of those people would be actually qualified. At the same time, it would be good to have some sort of information for the award judge picking people to find out about qualified folks they might not have on their radar. So some combination of these ideas and concerns is called for, but how that combination would manifest I have no idea. However, if something does become manifest, I’m more than willing to help bring it about. because that will indeed make me less angry.
However, experience suggests that award administrators can be rather stuffy about who they regard as suitably qualified. I just can’t see the WF Board being happy to consider someone just because they had volunteered. And I suspect a whole lot of people would volunteer and never get asked, which would lead to people getting upset.
Of course the administrators are picky–one would hope!–but I wouldn’t ever frame this in the language of “volunteering.” Rather, its goal would be to increase access to information that might be helpful to the WF Board. If their problem lately has been that they’ve asked 100 people and 95 of them said no, couldn’t it really hurt to take a quick look at a list of 50 people who would probably say yes if asked–even if it just winds up jogging their memory about people they might have asked anyway? Obviously, some people could be sensitive about putting their name out there and not getting called, but I’m not sure that would exceed the number of people who are sensitive about seeing no female judges for two years running.
Liz: so how would you choose the people to list?
I was actually imagining something self-selecting and self-signing-up. You might get some inappropriate signups, but if there was a note to the effect of “Here are some people who have judged in the past; please bear in mind that those selected for future juries will probably be of a similar level of establishment in the field as members of past juries,” I think most people would be able to evaluate their chances pretty reasonably.
Self-selecting and self-signing-up is volunteering. And I’m afraid I think way more people would believe themselves competent to be judges than the WF board would ever consider (and many of them might be right). Not to mention that the WF board would develop an immediate loathing for whoever was responsible for setting the thing up.
“Look, I’m not saying that a group of white guys can’t judge the World Fantasy Awards properly.”
…but the odds are stacked heavily against them.
Fair enough. Heck, it’s not like I can’t walk down the hall and have a conversation with David about it. If he and his thought it would be remotely useful, I would have no objection to pulling the trigger.
By all means, do talk to David. And if it turns out I’m being over pessimistic maybe we can talk more in Orlando (if you are going).
I assume I was asked (and served) that year because my anthology had been nominated the year before.
You don’t get paid.
Except via being able to hang out with some people via e-mail who are terrific, and whom you may have not known before — the other judges.
It’s not easy.
Love, C.
I had a wonderful time as a judge, as did, I believe our judging panel as a whole (including two women). I also volunteered because it was the only year where I had very few possible conflicts of interest and thus could be most effective. I was incredibly busy, but that didn’t enter into my thinking. I think if anyone wants to make a change, they should volunteer. If you want to be part of a community, then you should volunteer as a kind of civic duty. We’re all in this together. In any event, if women and non-Caucasians volunteered in droves, the administrators would have no possible excuse for having a balanced panel.
JeffV
Re that last sentence–I’m not saying this is ideal. Ideally, the administrators would be able to pro-actively find a balanced panel without volunteers.