17.948%: Best of Best New SF

May 3rd, 2008
by Yonmei
17-948-best-of-best-new-sf

The cover of

39 stories. 7 by women.

I had to find that out in the bookshop, because no review of it I’d read mentioned the one thing I wanted to know: by how much was it predominantly male? Answer: by just over 82%.

Ursula K. Le Guin is in it (“Coming of Age in Karhide”) and so is Pat Cadigan (“Roadside Rescue”). So are Maureen F McHugh and Eileen Gunn and Molly Gloss, but none of those five are mentioned on the cover.

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Filed under Publishing, women writers | Comments (13)

13 Responses to “17.948%: Best of Best New SF”

  1. J. Andrews on May 3, 2008 5:42 pm

    !

    Le Guin doesn’t sell books? There’s at least one name on that cover I hadn’t heard of before, and several more I couldn’t tell you what they write or where they’re published.

    Or is it that Le Guin isn’t ‘new’ enough for the cover?

  2. delagar on May 3, 2008 7:56 pm

    Color me shocked.

    Did you see the editorial over there on Strange Horizons about why women are under-represented in the SF world? Their conclusion (I kid you not) is not that editors tend to buy fewer stories from women, or that there is any sort of discrimination (unconscious or otherwise) against women writers and women’s SF in the SF world — nope, their conclusion was that more men get published than women b/c women are big quitters.

    And cry-babies, too, I think they said.

    Hey, they had the math to back it up and EVERYTHING.

  3. Liz Henry on May 3, 2008 11:12 pm

    *bursts into tears and quits*

    just kidding!

  4. Constance on May 4, 2008 4:10 pm

    In today’s NY Times “Movies” section some number of words were devoted to the disappearance of women in any significant roles as actresses, writers, directors, etc. in Hollywood.
    The 1991 Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women by Susan Faludi documented the quite organized efforts to get women back to their proper place and sphere. It seems to me that this has been more successful than even in the wildest dreams of those who wish it this way. And certainly not only against women, but that backlashing has also been particularly successful with the rise of the neo-racism.

    What’s going on in Congo, Darfur and elsewhere is only helping this horrible turn of the wheel, it seems.

    Love, C.

  5. Kate Elliott on May 5, 2008 12:36 am

    While I no longer have to see the Hollywood animated Kids Movies, I note in passing that especially in recent years they seem to feature animated casts in which 90% of the talking voices are male and 10% female (unscientific survey conducted by me), which surely gives children an oddly skewed view of, you know, biology and life.

  6. Yonmei on May 5, 2008 3:40 am

    See Ide Cyan’s (and others) comments on Bee Movie.

  7. Kate Elliott on May 6, 2008 2:41 am

    Yonmei: thanks for the link. Yeah, that about covers it, in the post and accompanying comments.

  8. Legible Susan on May 7, 2008 4:16 pm

    I don’t know whose editorial Delagar is thinking of but it’s not Strange Horizons. They haven’t run any editorials on this topic in the past 2 years, at least.

  9. delagar on May 7, 2008 4:39 pm

    Here, L. Susan –

    ttp://www.strangehorizons.com/2007/20070820/0women-publish-a.shtml

  10. delagar on May 7, 2008 4:43 pm

    rats — I mean here –

    http://www.strangehorizons.com/2007/20070820/0women-publish-a.shtml

  11. Legible Susan on May 9, 2008 1:28 pm

    Delagar:

    Oh, that. I knew I’d seen a stats-heavy essay on the subject somewhere.
    (i) It’s not an editorial, it’s an article by an outside contributor, republished from SFWA Bulletin.
    (ii) The “less competitive” quote is from Gordon van Gelder, and I think it’s consistent with his response elsewhere to the issue. The article itself is less dogmatic.

    Yes, the update still concludes that “lack of participation by women” is the major problem, but the author identifies several possible reasons, which don’t amount to being “quitters” let alone “cry-babies”.

  12. File 770 » Blog Archive » The Hugo and Gender Controversy, A Year Later on May 12, 2008 2:17 am

    [...] post on the Feminist SF blog using proportional representation as the hook, 17.948%: Best of Best New SF, challenged Gardner Dozois’ The Best of the Best New SF on grounds that only 7 of its 39 [...]

  13. delagar on May 17, 2008 2:46 pm

    Mea culpa — I misremembered the genre; and yes, I was snarky in my summary of the essay.

    Here’s what bothers me about essays of this sort: they place the root of the problem in a very comforting place: in women.

    Women don’t get published, or women don’t win prizes, or women don’t get hired, because of x, y, or z that *women* don’t do, not because of editors and judges and hiring committees do/don’t do.

    Thus, when I was in a highly competitive program in the late 90′s, run entirely by men, in which all the fellowships and prizes were going to the male students — well, we young feminists went to the male professors and said, what’s up? They replied, not our fault, the men just work harder. (Nothing to do with all the judges playing pool and drinking weekends with the fellas! Nothing to see here! Move along!) Oddly, when we succeeded in getting things changed so that submissions became anoynmous, women started winning lots of the prizes. How bizarre is that?

    Thus, when women were routinely not admitted to medical schools, as a rule not many women wanted to go to medical school, or applied to medical school. Now — why, look! more than sixty percent of medical school applicants are women. What in shit happened?

    Why don’t women submit to SF magazines as much as men do? Why aren’t as many women’s stories being bought as men’s? Why don’t women show up in those Best Of lists? Correlation or cause?

    Do the editors and judges need to change their biases?

    I bet you can guess what I think.

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