busyOf the 545 books reviewed between June 29, 2008 and Aug. 27, 2010:
—338 were written by men (62 percent of the total)
—207 were written by women (38 percent of the total)
Of the 101 books that received two reviews in that period:
—72 were written by men (71 percent)
—29 were written by women (29 percent)
So there is end-state imbalance in terms of representation, and that's a bad thing.
What I really want to know about, however, is their filter effect, if any. That is, I want to know what number of the books submitted for their consideration were written by men vs. women (and others), and what number by whites vs. people of color. Run those percentages and then compare to the percentages in the published reviews. If the percentages are similar, the imbalance is not the fault of the reviewers. But if, say, 60% of the submitted books are by women but only 38% of the reviewed books are, then that would definitely be the reviewers' fault.
This is crucial information because it would tell us where the problem lies. Screaming at the reviewers will only help if they are at fault. If the problem is upstream, we need to locate it and address it there, not distract ourselves with a downstream target.
By the way, the problem of balance isn't always in an obvious place. Back when I worked for PanGaia, we tended to get a lot more submissions of manuscripts and review copies from women than from men. (In Paganism, women tend to be the strong majority, which means that men's perspectives sometimes need extra support so they don't get obliterated.) But we wanted a better balance -- we had a whole separate magazine, SageWoman, that was all for women -- so we used a higher proportion of the stuff from men than the stuff from women. Sometimes we bumped really good stuff by women from PG over to SW, and SW would swap off stuff that men had sent there without reading the guidelines. Once in a while somebody would gripe about the balance (in either direction) and we would explain what was going on.
We paid attention to this because it was important to us. I know some other editors and publishers do, but most don't -- they have no real idea what their slushpile or bookstack proportions are unless they sit down and count, and few people bother to do that either. But to me as a reader and writer and scholar, this is crucial information. I wish more people would pay attention to what they're getting and what they're picking out of that, in terms of gender and race and whatever else may be an issue.
If you are an editor or publisher, do you know your proportions? What kind of things do you check for? Do you try to keep the proportions consistent from slush to publication, or push them in a particular direction for some reason? Do you hustle extra hard for submissions from underrepresented voices? Or do you just promote the stuff that you personally think is best, without conscious consideration of the source? Do you ever talk about these or similar issues with your colleagues?
September 5 2010, 02:27:01 UTC 10 years ago
(I believe, but am not certain, that there are more female authors than male authors in general fiction. If that's the case, then the New York Times is being sexist.)
Well...
September 5 2010, 03:04:02 UTC 10 years ago