When the 2007 Hugo ballot was released, there was a hailstorm of commentary about the lack of women on the list. I’m not sure how much the situation has changed in the genre (not much, imho) but I think it’s interesting that a very similar controversy is swirling around the “legit” literature circles right now. Clearly, this keeps happening because women can’t write their collective way out of a damp paper bag. And, yes, that’s sarcasm.
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I'm not sure that the two cited situations are that similar: the Hugo ballot is determined by the votes of a fraction of the readership (defined by Worldcon membership), while the PW list is compiled by "staff"–essentially a jury. Very different mechanisms and subcultures. And neither reflects publishing stats or readership demographics as I understand them. For as long as I've been paying attention, the readership for fiction in the US has been dominated by women, and bookstore contents reflect that. And in the forty-some years I've been observing the SF/F publishing biz, women have become quite visible, so that friends and acquaintances whom we first encountered as assistant editors or even fan writers are now very senior persons indeed.
So whatever is going on with prizes and lists (the latter of which have been a topic here before), it does not apprear to be simple sexism–it might reflect complex interactions of gender and media politics and economic factors, but simple, I don't think so.
Don't ignore the role of chance — after all, the sample size for just about any award, or even ten-best list, is pretty small. And note that a woman, Hilary Mantel, won this year's Booker Prize for WOLF HALL.
"Lack of women on the list" implies there weren't any. I was on the Hugo ballot that year.
The Hugo ballot I was referring to is this one, from the 2007 WorldCon: http://www.nippon2007.us/hugo_nominees.php. The only female nominee in the fiction categories was Naomi Novik, which set off a string of commentary.
Yes, the way the awards and nominations are chosen for the two awards are different but, no matter the method of choosing "the top x of x," the end result is similar. Women are under-represented. Which I don't quite understand if women are "quite visible" and dominating the readership.
I agree that it is a complex problem and involves interactions of gender and media politics and economic factors — all of which are part of sexism, simple or no.
There were, however, fifteen women nominated for the Hugo in various categories in 2007. I went and counted. Are we marginalizing their contribution (excepting Novik)? Or is fiction the only thing that is important? Let us understand how truly complex this whole situation is, and stop slicing and dicing for rhetorical purposes, because we are all in genre together and this discussion goes back decades.
I recall, and perhaps somone can look it up, that one feminist editor, Marilyn Hacker, in the late 1970s or early 1980s complained that she could not find more than about 29 % of work by women to publish. To go above that, she had to solicit very hard, and when she stopped, the percentage fell again to nearly precisely that level. Marilyn was also a close friend of Joanna Russ (and me, at the time). She was editor of Kenyon Review, and had previously worked on The Little Magazine with me, and Tom Disch, and Carol Emshwiller, among others. We had had the same situation on our magazine, even after doing special issues on Women and soliciting material, and she was amazed to find the same percentages held elsewhere after she left for Kenyon. That's why I remember the 29% figure (actually between 27 and 29 percent). I am not shocked, though a bit disappointed, to find it is still the case after forty years of feminism.
David Hartwell