By popular request ...

[coalescent]

Chance asked:

Have you ever examined how you stack up with regards to parity on people reviewed and people doing the reviewing?

The second "you" refers to sh_reviews. Several people said I should bump my answer up to a separate post, so here it is

Comments

[ninebelow]

I would be particularly glad to receive suggestions of authors for "feature weeks",

Matter coming out, you haven't read Use Of Weapons, Banks underexposed in US.

[talvalin]

I endorse this suggestion.

[bibliolicious]

Does Naomi Mitchison have enough in print for a feature week? I'm currently reading Lesley Hall's new Aqueduct bio/crit, together with Travel Light and probably Memoirs of a Spacewoman, for SH. Anyone want to join me?

[grahamsleight]

I'd be interested in doing Memoirs of a Spacewoman. Only problem, of course, is that SH has tackled Travel Light within living memory.

Failing that, you could always do an EA post :)

[coalescent]

I've run two separate reviews of The Name of the Wind and two of The Yiddish Policemen's Union; I have no problem covering Travel Light again.

[ninebelow]

God, I'd forgotten how restrained Dan was.

[despotliz]

The 29 men account for 92 (62%) of the reviews, while the 24 women account for 54 (38%) of the reviews.

Moar stats please! I want to know how it breaks down: is it that your male reviewers are averaging 3 books each while the females write 2 reviews, are there lots of women who only write one review, or do you have a core of reviewers who are writing lots of reviews which is predominantly male?

[coalescent]

OK, one of my jobs this weekend will be to make a proper spreadsheet from which I can calculate mean and median numbers of reviews and everything.

Off the top of my head, I think it's a combination of (a) and (b): there are more women who have only written one review this year than men who have only written one review this year, and those women who are reviewing regularly are writing fewer reviews per unit time.

[despotliz]

Further question: are your female reviewers just generally slower (I don't know how you work with giving them deadlines and so forth), or are they being given less reviewing assignments than the men?

[coalescent]

The former. Up until the end of June, I would send the reviewers' email group an email listing all the books we had available, and ask for people to pick, say, three they were interested in. I would then commission more than I need and not set strict deadlines. I sent people books they were interested in even if they had other reviews outstanding. The people who racked up multiple outstanding reviews were almost all women. (I am tempted to say here that Graham reviews like a girl, but that would be childish of me, so I won't.) In general, it seems to be the case that the women are busier than men and have more commitments beyond reviewing for SH, and that increases their turnaround time. I'm now more or less operating on a one-review-in one-book-out system, which I hope will help.

[coffeeandink]

This may be a features thing rather than a reviews thing, but I'd love to see overviews of the Tiptree and Brandon (and Plunkett?) short lists, a la the Nebula and Hugo overviews SH sometimes runs.

[coalescent]

Yes, that's an obvious thing to do. I meant to do it with the Tiptree this year, but got too busy with travel for work and travel for holiday to get it organised in a reasonable amount of time.

There will be a World Fantasy Award novel overview sometime in the autumn.

[oyceter]

Oooh, um, is a review of David Durham's Acacia in the works? I am curious to see what people think, given the buzz in the POC SFF blogosphere.

[coalescent]

Already reviewed!

[oyceter]

Yay! I knew I should have done more than a quick look at the front page.

[coalescent]

PS Isn't it, like, 2am where you are?
PPS Hooray I have more than one vowel!