I just read an article in the latest SFWA Bulletin by Susan Urbanek Linville called “SF and Fantasy in the New Millennium: Female Characters in Short Fiction.” It’s kind of academic in a way I can’t relate to (lots of charts trying to quantify what are really very subjective categories like what a story is ABOUT,) but her hypothesis is interesting. That is, there aren’t many.
According to Linville, only 23 percent of all the stories published in Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF during 2002, 2003 and 2005 had female protagonists. I’m not sure what to make of this, except that she said that a previous article of hers had found that there are not many women publishing short fiction in SF/F (not, it should be noted that women aren’t writing SF/F, just not being published). It is notable, I think, that currently none of the big three are edited by women.
My partner Shawn said she wasn’t surprised. After all, it was her impression that men still made up the majority of readers of SF/F. While Linville offered no information about whether or not that was true, she did note that female _media_ fandom is on the rise. Apparently in 2005, the SciFi UK Channel claimed that 51% of its viewers are now women. Just looking around at conventions, I would hazard to guess that women make up a significant portion of readers, too, although whether they prefer to read novels or short fiction one can’t say. My guess, in fact, would be that women tend to read novels over shorter fiction for the reason that Linville supposes – they’re more likely to find female protagonists there.
Of course, I’m making much of this up.
But, I do know that *I* like reading female protagonists – not exclusively, mind you, but my reading has drifted into mystery and paranormal romances just so that I can get my fill of sassy, proactive women heroes. I also have to admit to not having read much short fiction lately (although having read through some of the synopsis Linville provided as part of her article has made me want to go hunting up old issues of the big three to track down certain stories.) When I was younger and less discriminating, the gender of the hero was less of an issue, but if I think back to my favorite novels I did tend to prefer novels written by women, even when they had male protagonists.
I don’t really have a specific point I want to make, just that I find all this interesting. What do you think? Does gender matter?
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Absolutely gender matters. I'd love to see more short F&SF fiction by and about women.
Let me add a couple of quick notes. I don't have the data handy, so I'm going by memory here, and I may be wrong, but if I'm recalling things correctly, there are two major distinctions here that should probably be made, one between short and long form and one between fantasy and science fiction.
I believe that short form F&SF readership skews more male and that science fiction skews more male than fantasy at both lengths.
In fiction overall, the audience is overwhelmingly female with women buying something like 80% of all novels, but the proportions vary wildly by genre.
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