Awards Awards Awards

Today's the last day to vote for the Locus Awards. You don't have to be a subscriber or a professional or anything. I haven't voted myself, as I think I've only read one or two of the pieces on any of the lists. I don't know the um.. 'rules' of voting. Do people vote for things because they read them and liked them, even if they hadn't read the others in the category? Do people vote for authors even if they haven't read that particular story? Is it okay to vote for only one category and not fill in the rest of the ballot?

In other award news, the Tiptree Award winner and honors list was posted to the Wiscon lj community.

Notably on the list is Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss.

Lots of things to add to my to-read list!

For the curious, here's a link to the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award page.

Women Writing SF and Even F -- Where Are You?

The Angry Black Woman posted yesterday on The Feminist SF blog about submission and publishing statistics, etc. Are We Talking About Gender and Magazines AGAIN? --- Yes

Some juicy numbers about the percentages of women-written science fiction and fantasy that gets published in the magazines.
( See behind the cut for more links to more numbers! )

The numbers seem to indicate that men are published more than women, but also that men are submitting more than women.

Some have posited it's because women don't have the persistence to keep submitting to a market that rejects them once, twice, or a few times. Others that women have less time to write, what with the fulltime job and raising a family gig.

I don't feel that first suggestion applies to me, and the second most definitely does not. Yet I wouldn't count myself in the 30-40% of the submission pile, as I've only submitted twice. (I'm working on it!)

So here's some other posits ('women' here means 'most women' or 'the average woman' or 'more women than men'. It does not mean 'all women'.):

* Women have learned that short fiction markets don't pay much and they're after real money. So they're off writing novels, or they've jumped ship to better-paying markets such as romance or mystery, or even, gasp, mainstream or literary.

* To the contrary. Women don't care if they're paid for their short fiction, so they're off writing fanfic and original fic and gaining a modest readership online and in zines. For free.

* Women spend more time socializing and less time writing. If you leave a comment on this post, you're socializing!

* Women just don't write as well as men, particularly in the science fiction genre.

* Women's brains aren't wired in a way that lends itself to writing science fiction.

* Science fiction has typically excluded women, with its early lack of women as anything but sex objects or daughters who stand around asking their scientist Dad what's going on. So women didn't grow up reading and liking science fiction so much and eventually drifted to fantasy.

You might call some of the above posits silly and/or sexist, but I think they should be examined before being tossed out. I present them here for thought and discussion, not because I necessarily believe any or all of them to be true.

It's interesting to see on the Broad Universe stats page that Strange Horizons's readership survey in 2001 showed only 40% women. It's hard to find writers where even the readers don't exist. Writers are readers first.