Realms's All-Wimmin Issue

[barbarienne]

The editor announced it here and there has been considerable discussion on Jim Hines's blog here.

Full disclosure: Doug Cohen is a friend of mine. Realms is also the venue that bought my first (and so far only) published story.

Point 1, regarding Pandering: Holy Crom, people, it's not as if ROF is a venue that comes under fire for not publishing

Comments

[rachel_swirsky]

Not quibbling about the issue being a decent idea, which I think it is, but Horton doesn't record RoF as being at 50% female authorship. It's 35% this year, with the past two being recorded as 38 and 40. http://ecbatan.livejournal.com/85104.html

[barbarienne]

Ah, good, thank you for the info! I was working with faulty memory, for sure. I'll have to confirm with Doug if that proportion matches the overall gender distribution in the submissions.

[rachel_swirsky]

"Realms of Fantasy had the highest rate with 40% of 262 submissions from women (men 53%, unknown 7%)."-http://www.strangehorizons.com/2007/20070820/1women-update-a.shtml

[rachel_swirsky]

It probably is, though I don't think percentage of slush is a good metric for working out what percentage should be in the magazine. Slush is... well, slush. I have some ideas of what a better kind of metric might be, but they would probably be hard to track.

[barbarienne]

I just go on the theory that if we assume that men and women write equally well, then the proportion of acceptances should be about the same as the proportion of submissions.

It's a different question whether the proportions of the submissions reasonably reflects the proportion of the writer population of that genre. If people of a particular group are feeling unwelcome and therefore not submitting to a particular venue, that needs to be addressed (as at the other Big Three). But I don't think that women feel unwelcome at RoF. I would venture that the 40/60 split on submissions is probably consistent with the proportion of women/men writing fantasy short stories.

(Which is interesting, because I don't think there's a 40/60 split in writers of fantasy in general. But maybe there is? Or maybe women are more prone to successfully publish novels--Romance is 50% of all fiction, after all, and that's heavily female-written--and so don't spend as much time writing short stories... I dunno. It's a big pile of variables.)

[rachel_swirsky]

Women and men probably write equally well. That's not a necessary assumption, but I'm willing to take it as a decent place to start.

However, we know that gender affects submission habits. Editors have observed elsewhere that women seem to submit less often, concentrating their energy on fewer, better submissions. This means that they are underrepresented in terms of numbers, but that their smaller numbers are less full of dross.

I think measuring the percentages of decently published authors who submit to a magazine would be more likely to yield numbers that are of interest about its writing population. It wouldn't give data about writers breaking in, of course, but that's a relatively small percentage -- after all, people can only break in once.

[barbarienne]

Editors have observed elsewhere that women seem to submit less often, concentrating their energy on fewer, better submissions. This means that they are underrepresented in terms of numbers, but that their smaller numbers are less full of dross.

-->That's certainly true of me, personally, so now that you point it out, it makes a good deal of sense!

I do wonder about the possibility of a "gender-hidden" submission process. How would one do it? "Please submit all stories from a neutrally-named email address without a byline. We will request the correct byline if we accept your story"?

[rachel_swirsky]

I think the markets that do it have an assistant whose job it is to strip identifying info off of subs and to track where the subs came from. This works better with email.

As I've said elsewhere, I think this would provide interesting results, but not be a panacea, as I think a lot of aversion to work by women (for instance) comes from the devaluing of female subjectivity. You can't take the female subjectivity out by swapping the byline.

It would work for stories that aren't embodied in that particular way, though.

[barbarienne]

I think a lot of aversion to work by women (for instance) comes from the devaluing of female subjectivity.

-->Yes, I've generally wondered if part of the problem at the Big Three is there's a certain type of style that their editors prefer, which is more often written by men than women--and possibly more often read by men than women. Their lower proportion of subs from women strikes me as indicative of a lower proportion of female readers.