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are there any women here today?
Feb. 2nd, 2015 10:57 amDiscussion of Women Destroy Science Fiction, already brought up here, has raised the question of the exactly what is the prominence of women in contemporary SF. Is the Monstrous Regiment taking over, as the sexist squad charges, or are women's places at this table still insecure and unstable?
It could be both, actually, and all feelings on this topic are subjective. What we need is an objective way to measure subjective perceptions, and I've got one: award nomination finalists. What gets nominated for the Hugo - I'm using nominations rather than winners because it gives a much larger but still prestigious dataset - not only gives a consensus of a large number of dedicated readers (as opposed to that of a single Best SF of the Year anthologist) of who's doing the important and high-quality work in the field right then, but it communicates a picture of that field to a larger group of readers.
What I've done is gone all the way back to the institution of Hugo nominations in 1959, counted up the number of stories on the final ballot in the various fiction categories taken together, determined which ones were written by women, and let the computer calculate the percentage.
The raw figures, plus the names of the authors, are below (source), but here's a summary of the trends.
1) Occasional stories by women have been around since the beginning, but they were few and intermittent.
2) Numbers rose in the 1970s, usually 15-20%. Many were by Tiptree (still thought to be a man for most of that time) and Le Guin.
3) A 10-25% range continued to prevail for most of the 1980s, despite many new authors on the ballot: C.J. Cherryh, Octavia Butler, Connie Willis.
4) It rose during the 1990s, above 25% every year from 1990 to 1997, reaching a peak in 1992-93, in both of which years half the stories were by women. Again, more new authors as well as older ones. Willis and Bujold in particular strode the Earth, but they were far from alone.
5) A collapse followed in 1998 to 2009. Numbers were back down to the 15-25% of the 70s and 80s, and in two years only one story each (5%) was by a woman.
6) Revival came in 2010. Each of the five years from then has had 39% or higher, and three of the five years exceeded half. Huge number of authors new to the ballot, including numerous repeat appearances by Seanan McGuire, Mary Robinette Kowal, Rachel Swirsky, Catherynne M. Valente, and Kij Johnson.
ETA: From some of the comments on this io9 post, it may be necessary to reiterate that these are nominees that made the final ballot, not necessarily the winners of the Hugo Award.
( Here are the statistics )
I didn't do the Nebulas as well, because 1) I don't have that much time; 2) the Nebula ballot for fiction is usually longer than the Hugo, and thus more time-consuming to work with; 3) it has more authors I haven't heard of than the Hugos do, requiring time-consuming lookups. (It saves a tremendous amount of time when you already know without having to check that, say, Pat Cadigan is a woman but Terry Bisson is a man.) But the impression I get from glancing over the lists is that the percentage of stories by women getting Nebula nominations generally exceeds that of the Hugos, and that the number of winners certainly does.
ETA:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
k6rfm made this chart to visualize the data. The blue line is the data, the red line is a 5-year symmetric moving average. (There's another chart by thnidu in the comments.)
( the visuals )
It could be both, actually, and all feelings on this topic are subjective. What we need is an objective way to measure subjective perceptions, and I've got one: award nomination finalists. What gets nominated for the Hugo - I'm using nominations rather than winners because it gives a much larger but still prestigious dataset - not only gives a consensus of a large number of dedicated readers (as opposed to that of a single Best SF of the Year anthologist) of who's doing the important and high-quality work in the field right then, but it communicates a picture of that field to a larger group of readers.
What I've done is gone all the way back to the institution of Hugo nominations in 1959, counted up the number of stories on the final ballot in the various fiction categories taken together, determined which ones were written by women, and let the computer calculate the percentage.
The raw figures, plus the names of the authors, are below (source), but here's a summary of the trends.
1) Occasional stories by women have been around since the beginning, but they were few and intermittent.
2) Numbers rose in the 1970s, usually 15-20%. Many were by Tiptree (still thought to be a man for most of that time) and Le Guin.
3) A 10-25% range continued to prevail for most of the 1980s, despite many new authors on the ballot: C.J. Cherryh, Octavia Butler, Connie Willis.
4) It rose during the 1990s, above 25% every year from 1990 to 1997, reaching a peak in 1992-93, in both of which years half the stories were by women. Again, more new authors as well as older ones. Willis and Bujold in particular strode the Earth, but they were far from alone.
5) A collapse followed in 1998 to 2009. Numbers were back down to the 15-25% of the 70s and 80s, and in two years only one story each (5%) was by a woman.
6) Revival came in 2010. Each of the five years from then has had 39% or higher, and three of the five years exceeded half. Huge number of authors new to the ballot, including numerous repeat appearances by Seanan McGuire, Mary Robinette Kowal, Rachel Swirsky, Catherynne M. Valente, and Kij Johnson.
ETA: From some of the comments on this io9 post, it may be necessary to reiterate that these are nominees that made the final ballot, not necessarily the winners of the Hugo Award.
( Here are the statistics )
I didn't do the Nebulas as well, because 1) I don't have that much time; 2) the Nebula ballot for fiction is usually longer than the Hugo, and thus more time-consuming to work with; 3) it has more authors I haven't heard of than the Hugos do, requiring time-consuming lookups. (It saves a tremendous amount of time when you already know without having to check that, say, Pat Cadigan is a woman but Terry Bisson is a man.) But the impression I get from glancing over the lists is that the percentage of stories by women getting Nebula nominations generally exceeds that of the Hugos, and that the number of winners certainly does.
ETA:
k6rfm made this chart to visualize the data. The blue line is the data, the red line is a 5-year symmetric moving average. (There's another chart by thnidu in the comments.)( the visuals )
