My own gender experiments

There’s a been some talk lately in the usual circles about gender equality in genre fiction. It’s not a new argument and it’s not east to find, particularly if you look up SFSignal’s recent Mindmeld features. And in response there’s been some anger, but we’re all beyond tired of RaceFail and GenderFail and every other damn thing so that’s the not the point of this post, just the inspiration. Over the weekend I also saw a magazine/podcast of some sort putting out a public call for more women and minority writers to include in their interviews.

My first thought was, wait, you’ll pursue the men, but you want the women to come to you? Because I’ve done the same thing, asked for recommendations of minority and women-written and lead fiction and the silence was deafening. So I found it on my own, or did I?

I’ve spent the evening going through my shelves over on GoodReads to see how my reading habits stack up. I honestly couldn’t tell you whether I read more male or female writers because I don’t pay much attention, but I also know I read a lot of urban fantasy which is primarily female.

So, some disclaimers before I tell you what I found.

• My numbers are flawed because I had to go by photos I could find to guess on the gender and minority status of authors. In some cases the name was a pseudonym and I couldn’t find anything about the author. In other cases the book was an anthology and I could confirm that there were both male and female contributors but couldn’t tell you what race the contributors were. Also, in a few cases I knew there were minority authors in the collection, but didn’t feel right even hinting at it in public because they aren’t “out”.
• Books written by female authors got tagged as female author, books with male authors were tagged as male author. Books written by both, either with a pair sharing a pseudonym (like Ilona Andrews) or with male and female contributors were tagged with both. Books written by people who identify as female or male were tagged as the gender they identify as, whether they have “changed” or not (ie Zoe Whitten and Poppy Z. Brite)
• I know before going in that there would be more books on the minority shelf if I include authors who write minority leads (Sara M. Harvey, Jennifer Pelland, Ann Aguirre and myself would all fit there, but despite what we write we’re all married white women.)
• There’s also the complication of racial identity itself. Is “white” just the color of your skin or the part of the world your ancestors come from? Does a light skinned mixed person become white if they’re light enough? Are Jews and Italians white or minorities, seeing as I’ve met people of each who identify both ways. What about the Russian author whose book I read as a translation? His skin says white, his home says Asian. I didn’t even think about classifying non-Christians as minorities, because how would I know? And just where the hell do you put someone like Lavie Tidhar?

Those bewares aside, here’s how it broke down.

“Read” books: 361

Male Author: 202

Female Author: 180

Minority Author: 27

So yeah, it’s official. I suck.

My defense: I have a ton of “minority author books” that I’ve bought on my own time (I’m particularly salivating over some Serissa Glass and Octavia Butler that I’ve had since the beginning of the year) but have consistently pushed back (along with a lot of non-minority authors) in the reading queue because of the demands of reviewing. There’s also many on my wishlist (like S.P. Somtow’s entire back list) that I have been having trouble finding (and affording). And again, I think my list would darn near double if I included books with minority major characters written by non-minority writers.

Other observations:

• Not once did I get to put “female author” on a graphic novel.
• Only once did I get to put “female author” on an RPG book.
• I’m probably wrong about both of those and just don’t have the inclination to look up all the contributors for all the RPG books and graphic novels to fix it.
• If it hadn’t been for those sections and the nonfiction research books women writers would have “won”.
• I have, however read a lot of fantasy by women. A LOT.
• I don’t have a way to break the individual genres down by the gender of the writer, without spending another night or two doing it, but here’s my genre break down for reference: Children’s/Middle grade-44, Fantasy-53, Fiction Magazine-10, Graphic Novels-33, Horror/suspense-110, Manga- 4, Mystery-15, Nonfiction-8, Poetry-2 (I know this is wrong because I’ve read 4 of Ellen Hopkins’ poetry books and can name three other poetry books that should be on that shelf), Romance-13, RPGs-10, Science fiction-25, Urban Fantasy-80, YA-23 *Some books are on more than one shelf, particularly anthologies and magazines that contain multiple genres and YA books which could as YA and SF or F or UF or H).

 

What does this mean? Maybe nothing because I’m only one reader looking at my reading habits. Honestly thinking about it, I don’t see how I can ever keep even reads between male and female, minority and non. There just isn’t enough evenness in what’s being published in the first place.