Size / / /

One of the articles in this week's issue was our SF Count for 2012, looking at gender balance in SF reviewing. This post is for a few follow-up notes.

First of all, thanks to Annalee Newitz at io9, Rebecca Pahle at The Mary Sue, and John Scalzi at Whatever for linking to us; I'm pleased to see the data being so widely disseminated. Note that John also did his own count, for his 'Big Idea' feature, in the post I've just linked to.

Second, there were a few venues missed out of the count that should have been included, namely io9 itself, the SF department at the LA Review of Books, and RT Book Reviews. Natalie Luhrs, an editor at RT until the end of last year, has posted their data here. I'm going to borrow her graphs for the last three years of RT (the period covered by our counts):

As I've mentioned a couple of times on Twitter, I'm not going to start looking at trends in the main count until we've got another couple of years' worth of data in hand.

I've also prepared updated versions of our charts, including numbers for LARB and io9. They both sit mid-table, although for 3 (of 13) reviewers at io9 I couldn't assign gender with confidence, and that could obviously affect their percentage on that measure.

All three venues will be included in next year's count.

Finally, it's been pointed out to me that my introduction -- "VIDA started it" -- elides work done by other groups before 2010, which is true. As I mentioned in the 2010 count, Broad Universe provided valuable statistics for reviews in Locus in 2000 and 2007. I'd like to be able to reference data for SF venues from even further back, so please do let me know of any you're aware of (online or offline).



Niall Harrison is an independent critic based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is a former editor of Strange Horizons, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Science FictionFoundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and others. He has been a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a Guest of Honor at the 2023 British National Science Fiction Convention. His collection All These Worlds: Reviews and Essays is available from Briardene Books.
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22 Apr 2024

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