I have yet to see any evidence regarding whether or not most readers care if the author of a piece has dangly bits or not.

So I remain unmotivated on the issue.

(I think the FB also had a slight bias towards women writers too. I never gave it much thought though. I bet it has something to do with e-subs.)

I don’t think the point is whether they care, but whether unbeknownst to them they’re missing out on something. Or something like that.

David, is this really a question? Take the extreme example -- if magazines suddenly refused to publish stories by men, ever again, that would obviously be Bad for Literature, right? The overall quality of the stories published would go down as the major consequence (not because men write better, but because you've just cut the amount of competition in half). Is anyone arguing with this?

A smaller consequence would also be that we'd lose a valuable perspective, if you believe in the particularity of experience and viewpoint, which I do. Imagine a world of fiction written only by straight white men -- oh, wait, you don't even have to imagine. Just go back a century or so.

I admit, I'm bewildered. Are you just setting up strawmen in order to knock them down, or are you really serious with this question???

Mary Anne, I don’t know which question you’re asking about.

If it’s “And what’s to be done about it?” then absofuckin’lutely I think it’s a question.

If it’s “whether unbeknownst to them they’re missing out on something,” then, yes, I think it is really a question, (even if I also think the answer to that question is a qualified “yes”).

If it’s “Is this hurting the readers?” then — I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about this, but — in the grand scheme of things, does it matter whether or how much a handful of formerly prominent magazines suck? I’m not talking about magazines in the sense of all magazines and I’m certainly not talking about a world of fiction.

And while we’re misunderstanding each other —

Are you actually suggesting that I might be such an unreconstructed pig that I don’t value diverse experiences and viewpoints? Or am I just so amazingly ignorant that I don’t realize how little the Western Canon values them?

Have I ever given you reason before to think I’m bigoted or stupid?

Or am I just so bad at expressing myself that you can’t help but assume I am?

"What I wonder is, what it would take to get guys complaining (do they?) about women, on a percentage-published vs. percentage-of-submissions basis, being two or three times as likely to get published in Strange Horizons as men."

If SH paid their authors, say, 20 cents a word or 10 cents a word and ran as a print mag, then I think guys would start complaining about the ratio.

SH is already a good market, but the older it gets, the more respected, and the higher the pay rate, the more likely it is guys are going to start arguing that they're being "left out."

We're not quite at that stage yet, though I'm remembering a particular hullabaloo that David Brin kicked up when Glory Season didn't win the Tiptree... the older and more established and more well known the market/honor, the more guys are going to start yelling bias.

I think SH isn't too long away from hearing from the boys about how "unfair" it is that more women than men are publishing there. I know I've already heard the occasional gripe, especially now that their pay rate has gone up and people in the field are talking more and more about SH stories.

Jeremy: I hate throwing this thing around because it's twenty years old and it tends to depress people, but as per your request, here's a bit of evidence (scroll down to the "authored by" table). Of course, that was technical science writing, and twenty years ago; here we're talking about SF/F short fiction, and now... biases change and shift, even switch polarities unexpectedly. Unconscious biases are such fickle, flexible things. And we're talking about unconscious biases here, just to be clear, so even if an editor/reader SAYS they don't care -- even if they believe down to the marrow of their bones -- that doesn't actually guarantee that the gender of the byline isn't affecting a particular manuscript's chances. Do you remember that meme that went around last year? Where everybody listed their favorite books and authors? And several people observed that the women's lists tended to have plenty of male-authored books, and the men's lists tended to have very few, if any, female-authored books? That by itself was enough to convince me that the question was worth exploring in a more systematic fashion.

David: Of course, I wasn't only talking about author gender bias... that issue just happened to be making the rounds lately. There could easily be biases against authors with obviously non-WASP names. The slush process automatically introdues biases associated with established vs. new authors; authors the editor/reader knows and likes may favor better than authors the editor/reader doesn't know. Certainly they fare better in the carefully-controlled experimental environment of my bathroom reading pile... and it wouldn't surprise me if some editors are actually biased slightly against their closest friends, for strange over-compensatory reasons. And now we can argue about which of these biases are actually important, and why?

But in the case of F&SF, and taking their word for it, I haven't seen data comparable to the numbers Jed compiles for SH. I personally am having difficulty just taking that statement at face value because of the fact that F&SF is the only one of the major mags to my knowledge which has exhibited a precipitous drop in female-authored stories in the last ten years. Even if women are self-selecting out of the submissions pool (and I'm sure that they are), they would only do so because of some newly-introduced discouraging factor... somewhere in there, that implies that the publication fraction was staying at least 5-10% below the submissions fraction annually for a sustained period of time.

But I'll argue for not taking their word for it, and someone else will argue against me, and neither one of us has anything more than a 15-word statement to go on. This argument will continue unproductively -- even harmfully -- until kingdom come. Or until F&SF produces statistics for the last 10 years comparable to Jed's for SH -- at which point we will continue to argue, but we will at least have a clearer idea of what to argue about. If GvG ever wants to hear the end of this and set the matter to rest, then he should hire some college sophomore and pay them in stale candy bars and tuna fish for a summer to go through the last decade and compile the numbers. Or, if there's no surviving record of past years' slush submissions, start keeping better records and making them public from here on out.

Similarly, while gender-blind reading may be extraordinarily labor intensive, I do believe that it's the only way an editor has to reassure themselves that they are NOT letting the byline, all by itself, affect their decision. See above reference to authorship bias in technical science writing. And I hate to quote Gladwell almost as much as I hate to quote that authorship study, but please feel free to check out the startling results of gender-blind orchestra auditions in the concluding chapter _Blink_. Speaking for myself, I think that was the moment when I truly began to believe in the Power of the Byline...

---
My best stab-in-the-dark guess for the future? Is that we will see more magazines like SH and Fantasy coming to dominate the markets, until eventually the SF/F short fiction world comes to look like the current college admission pool (sorry, it's the old pay-per-view NYT archives trick... here's an old PBS transcript approaching the same subject with a different bent), until eventually female-authored stories come to dominate the SF/F short fiction market. And then, as David and Kameron are sensibly discussing, the argument will suddenly reverse: don't we need to hear from the men's perspective? In college admissions this worry is causing recruiters and admission's officers to use different standards on male and female applications because strong female candidates with honor-roll grades, good SAT scores, athletic backgrounds, and long community service histories are turning out to be a dime a dozen.

And so we progress!

Jam, have you read the Susan Linville article? It doesn’t have trends, unfortunately, but it does provide a data point for F&SF for 2002: 25% submissions identifiably from women, vs. 19% of published stories. (Nobody else responded to her with a count, just estimates, and we know what those are worth.)

I do believe that it’s the only way an editor has to reassure themselves that they are not letting the byline, all by itself, affect their decision.

I’m not disputing that; I’m just saying I don’t see any of the big commercial magazines deciding that reassurance is worth any significant investment of time and money.

(Um, wait. Actually I am disputing it, because I don’t see how you could distinguish between the editor’s bias and a gendered tendency toward writing stories more or less to the editor’s taste. I think we’re short a variable and I don’t know what it is. But let that slide for a second.)

Say that we could show that a story with an identifiably male byline has, oh, a 50% better chance (argh must not treat publishing as game of chance argh argh) of getting published than a story with an identifiably female byline. Say that, in a fit of remorse, GvG goes over to gender-blind submissions.

Instead of four times as many stories by men in F&SF as by women, now we have three times as many.

Yay.

Do you see why I’m not convinced that focusing on editor bias is necessarily the most interesting thing to do here?

(Also, looking at both the Linville article’s time series an various years’ SH stat posts from Jed — the numbers are all over the map — I think we may have a Law of Small Numbers problem. Each individual publication just doesn’t buy enough stories in a given year.)

K, good point about pay rates and prestige and whatnot. Ah, if some nice zillionaire would just endow SH with a ten-million-dollar fiction fund . . .

Come on, rich people, it’d be worth it just for the fights!

Say that, in a fit of remorse, GvG goes over to gender-blind submissions.

Instead of four times as many stories by men in F&SF as by women, now we have three times as many.

Or five times as many. Which, from having talked to GVG about it, I think is more likely. That is, GVG actively feels guilty, or at least weird, about the fact that his stable of writers resemble him so much. He may not find it morally justifiable to actively strive against it, but he's likely to be, subsconsciously, tremendously relieved when a story with a female byline grabs, holds, and otherwise alaslessly has its way with him.

That is to say, a gender-blind submissions process might remove the braking effect of editorial gender-guilt, allowing free rein to "a gendered tendency toward writing stories [...] to the editor’s taste".

David, I did not read Mary Anne's question as an accusation of bigotry. She suggested you were setting up a (non-gender-diversity-valuing) straw man to knock it down -- that is, if anything, she suspected you of being too partisan a feminist, not the opposite. But actually I read it as a non-rhetorical, non-judgemental, non-accusatory "Huh? Where are you going with that?"

Huh, but this is striking from the Linville article:

Ferman published an average of 21% stories by women, Rusch 34% and Van Gelder 27.5%. Chi Square analysis indicates that Rusch published significantly more stories by women than Ferman, but there is no significant difference between Rusch and Van Gelder.

Benjamin: 27% is the average value from 1998 - 2001. You'll observe that by 2001 he's back down to 19% published (vs. 25% submitted.) Here's a rough count of 2002-2006; Chance has pointed out that she sees several names missing from the female counts, but it looks like he's actually dropped below 19% in the last few years. So, to reiterate: the only magazine to exhibit a marked drop in recent history.

Or five times as many. Which, from having talked to GVG about it, I think is more likely. That is, GVG actively feels guilty, or at least weird, about the fact that his stable of writers resemble him so much.

Sure. Overcompensatory bias. Could be. But, not having actually done the experiment, we don't know. We could happily argue about what we think would happen until the day when kangaroos start evolving opposable thumbs and a working language system, but we still wouldn't know without doing the experiment.

David: I don't follow you on the "short a variable" bit. Okay, true, reading blind is not equivalent to that authorship study I quoted up there, because that was the same paper being handed around to many readers, while reading blind involves handing many manuscripts to the same editor. But you can still deconvolve the effects of a true gendered-writing preference from an unconscious byline bias by comparing the published fraction from the blind-reading period to the published fractions before and after.

Re: small numbers -- yes, that does make the blind-reading experiment difficult if the byline bias only makes, say, a 10% difference. Then again, at the end you do get to say: hey, well, it's less than a 10% difference!

Is that enough motive to actually run something as labor-intensive as a blind-reading experiment? Well, the more I think of it, the more I realize how hard it would be. So probably not, no.

But then again, if it keeps coming up again and again? Irritation can be a great motivator.

But the fastidious compiling of the slushpile statistics is still worthwhile: given several year's worth of manuscripts, sqrt(N) is small enough for a 1-sigma comparison between the submitted and published fractions. And if any trends do pop out as function of time, then they're probably significant.

Bearing in mind that I'm actually of the "I prefer for editors to publish what grabs them" camp... and if it were demonstrated, in some purely hypothetical alternative timeline, that a particular editor's submission-to-published gender fraction skew is totally due to editorial taste responding to strongly-gendered styles of writing, then I think I can live with that. Mostly. Maybe? It depends.

David, you goofball. Ben is right, I was only bewildered in my response; you seem to have read it as accusatory somehow. It wasn't meant that way. I have utter and complete faith in your feminist, etc. consciousness.

Which is sort of the reason for my bewilderment; I still feel like I must be missing a logical step here, in how you get from what I am quite sure you believe to this:

"If it’s “whether unbeknownst to them they’re missing out on something,” then, yes, I think it is really a question, (even if I also think the answer to that question is a qualified “yes”)."

I just don't get how you find that a question, given that it seems so obvious a "yes" to me. Explain, please??? Is it not so obvious? Am I just being dense? Do I need to call you up on Skype to have you explain it to me?

I'll also note that I pretty much entirely agree with Jackie on this, especially after running across that dramatic orchestra example in reading elsewhere (hiring of female musicians went up 25-46% when they starting auditioning with the musician behind a black velvet curtain on the stage).

If I were setting up Strange Horizons now, I would set it up with blind submissions, whether that meant finding a programmer to automate it, or talking some interns into doing it manually. Alas, it is no longer in my hands.

“Oh, wait, you don’t even have to imagine”?

Qualified yes: Is it a problem if people watch NASCAR? No. Is it a problem if people only watch NASCAR? Yes. Is it a problem if ESPN only shows NASCAR? . . . Well, how many channels do you get?

(Substitute “Battlestar Galactica” for “NASCAR” and “The Sci-Fi Channel” for “ESPN” if you like.)

Also, next time instead of posing a rhetorical question, which apparently I’m not very good at, I will just say: “Hey, authors! Shut up about your problems for a minute and think of the readers!”

I feel a little dumb on this issue, but if we're talking about subconcious bias in editors, as someone mentioned above, what exactly is supposed to be done about that? Are we to somehow punish or ostracize editors who have a subconcious bias? Are people really going to hold editors responsible for unintended biases?

I mean, I have read that tests show that a lot of people are subconciously racist, but so long as they aren't actively racist, I don't see a big problem there. Or at least, a repairable one.

I'm just not sure what can be done about subconcious behavior.

Re: Blind submissions - The one pro publication that does blind submissions - Writers of the Future - tends to be populated overwhelmingly male. In 2005, the listed winners and published finalists were 2 women and 13 men. A quick skim of the other years seems to reflect a similar slant.

Jer - I'm afraid I disagree - if an employer refuses to hire qualified candidates because of their skin color, etc., I hardly care if it is because they are consciously or unconsciously racist - the effect is the same.

By recognizing that you may have a subconscious bias, it allows you to challenge your decision making process, to examine your the basis for them and help to change that.

Not hiring someone based on the color of their skin would be actively, conciously racist, wouldn't it? As opposed to crossing to the other side of the street whenever approaching someone who makes you feel "uncomfortable" would be more subconcious. I suppose someone subconciously racist might not hire someone, but how do you prove it? And what do you do about it?

So are you saying that this debate is about pointing out to the editors that they subconciously have a bias against women and... what? We won't be happy until they recognize it? Once they recognize it, what happens then?

And another thing, no matter what, you'll always be hard-pressed to explain bias. Whether its racism, sexism, or maybe, hey, Gordon or whatever other editor we're talking about (but really Gordon, right?) just didn't like the story. How do you _know_ its one thing and not another? Correlation doesn't equal causation. (Now I go shoot myself for saying that.)

Jeremy:

Not hiring someone based on the color of their skin would be actively, conciously racist, wouldn't it?

Sure -- if that's actually why you think you didn't hire them. But odds are it was affecting the choice a lot more than you know, even if skin color never once entered your conscious decision-making process.

Let's try the orchestra example first, since that's what I have on hand: twenty, thirty years ago, it was a well-established fact that there was a distinct female "style" to the playing of brass instruments. Women, it was widely believed, lacked the lung capacity to produce a strong, full, brassy sound in an instrument such as the trombone or the french horn; the "female" sound tended to be softer, more airy.

But once screened auditions became commonplace, the judges were being repeatedly surprised to find that the strongest, fullest, brassiest sounds often came from prim, petite, distinctly female horn players. Did you see the numbers Mary Anne quoted up there? There was no denying it: their eyes had been tricking their ears into hearing something that wasn't there. Or not hearing what was.

...because listening to the tone and quality of a trombone player, much like reading a SF/F manuscript or hiring a job applicant, is a highly subjective experience, and therefore susceptible to all sorts of external, subconscious pressures. Including what the reader/interviewer/orchestra conductor ate for lunch. Or their recent argument with their spouse. Or the fact that their mother told them not to drive alone through inner city neighborhoods.

In the skin color hiring case, an interviewer may decide not hire an applicant because... they struck the interviewer as somewhat dishonest. Not adequately amibitious, not serious enough. Too jocular. They weren't a good communicator. Their grade point average was good, but they didn't strike the interviewer as being quite as sharply intuitive as the other applicant. All of these impressions are being mitigated strongly at the unconsious level by the same shorthand reflex that causes a white person to casually move to the other side of the street... but if the applicant could remove their skin color from the process by conducting a phone interview, you might be surprised at how sharply the interviewer's over impression changes; odds are, the interviewer will be surprised, too.

How do you _know_ its one thing and not another?

That's actually what the gender-blind experiment is designed to test; once you remove the byline information, then the only thing left is editorial taste, convolved with any true gendered-writing style tendencies of the authors. But you've removed the biasing effect of seeing the author on stage playing the metaphorical trombone, and all that's left is your own preference for what they actually sound like. Grok the difference?

It's not necessarily just GvG. True, he's the one who's been under discussion in recent weeks, and one component of this particular conversation has been people arguing whether or not there is a submissions/publication skew in F&SF. But, as we've been pointing out in little asides, the SH editors have also exhibited a strong bias in the opposite direction. They could easily find themselves under the same microscope in a few years.

And if you do determine to your own satisfaction that you are susceptible to a particular bias? What can you do about it? Well, you can try to stay conscious of it... but it's your subconscious, of course, so you won't actually know when you're not compensating enough, or even overcompensating. So basically, you need to devise a strategy for outsmarting it -- hence screened auditions, phone interviews, and blind reading.

Chance:

So what's the gender-to-gender submission fraction to WotF? Because while blind reading is great (yay!) it's only half of what you need in order to be able to say what your editorial preferences truly are -- you also need the submissions vs. published gender breakdowns.

Jackie - I don't think the WOTF numbers are published anywhere (nor do I think they are particularly gettable.) Looking through the responses on the Rumormill rejection/acceptance log the M/F breakdown seems about even. (Yes, I know this is a self-selected sample and could be skewed from the actual data. It's the best I can come up with.)

So, it sounds like the Speculative Literature Foudnation and Broad Universe need to drum up money for a grant to be given to any pro publication willing to switch to a byline-blind submission process and keep gendered data on submissions and publication, said money to cover the administrative overhead of said process....

Eh. I'm sure there are people who'd be interested in a grant like that, Ben, but I'm not one of them. I understand and appreciate all of the problems of bias, but I just don't find anything appealing about being on the editorial end of a blind submissions process. Dunno.

The conversation at dinner last night:

Chris: "Well, yeah. Of course they don't want to read blind. This actually comes up all the time in stereophile circles -- there's a big camp that believes the only way to fairly judge a piece of stereo equipment is to do full-out double-blind tests. But the truth is, no reviewer actually wants to participate in a double-blind test. I wouldn't."

Me: "Because it's a lot of work?"

Chris: "It's an incredible amount of work... but also, a lot of the fun of reviewing stereo equipment is knowing that you're one of the first people on Earth to see the brand-new shiny thing from Company X. If you didn't know that, it would just be drudgery."

Me: "Huh."

... and of course, as a reader that's true, too: I'm always going straight for the brand-new, shiny story by Writer So-and-So. And magazines are businesses, they have to think about marketing to attract the most readers, etc., etc....

There's a little bit of that, yeah. I can't say it's a major factor, but it's a small contributing factor. Not on the "our readers will want to see this author's name" front, though. Just on the sheer joy of seeing that name myself. Some weeks, getting through the submissions just feels like a long slog through a swamp of boring writing and stupid cliches, and then I see that the next story on my list is by an author whose work I usually like, and there's a rush of "oh! hey! cool!" I may not like that particular story as much as I've liked other things by that author, but at least I have that brief shining moment of happy expectations.

I mean, editors are readers too, you know?

Sure. But editors are also the executive branch of this particular government. (...wait, so writers are the legislature, and readers are the courts? Or readers are the voters, reviewers are the judiciary... ah, the hell with it.)

Anyway, what that means is that editors are in a pivotal position w.r.t. influencing/reinforcing/re-wiring unconscious influences... they're also the only ones who are in a real position to do anything as drastic as blind reading. I mean, as a plain old reader-reader, I can't easily send my husband into the B&N ahead of me to rip all of the covers off of all the books...

and then I see that the next story on my list is by an author whose work I usually like, and there's a rush of "oh! hey! cool!" I may not like that particular story as much as I've liked other things by that author, but at least I have that brief shining moment of happy expectations.

But -- leaving aside the whole author gender thing for a moment (whew!) -- you realize that initial burst of glee is strongly influencing the way you read the subsequent manuscript? For better or for worse.

Of course, the readers of the eventual published piece will also have their reading experience colored by their reaction to the byline...

...

(...still a 25-45% change with screened audtions? oof.)

You’ll go crazy a lot slower if you think of editors as people first and as parts of a system way, way later. Trust me on this.

I think the orchestra comparison means less here than you think it does. Especially in the context of the whole thing about women having breathier play styles, or whatever, that was clearly a case of dealing with a -conscious- or -explicit- bias. What you're talking about in terms of major genre magazines, you're dealing at worst with an unconscious or implicit bias. Implicit biases are very powerful, I would never say that they're not, but it does make the comparison less relevant. I can basically guarantee you that there's not a single editor of a pro magazine in this field who would actually be -surprised- to find that a good, strong, well-written SF story had been written by a woman.

As for the government analogy, which appears to be based on the premise that access to publication in a magazine is some kind of public right or service, I'm going to drop that entirely lest I get all twitchy and angry.

Ah, see, David, that's the point I was originally trying to make: editors is people, and people is susceptible to all sorts of tricks their brains pull on them in ways that they don't even know about. The more data I see, the more I realize it affects everything about the way I interact with the people around me, and the way they interact with me...

I just wish people were more aware of it, so that they could think about what all that affects, and what all they might actually be able to do about it. If they need to do anything.

I just wish there was some way I could point out all of these unconscious effects to people in general without them assuming I'm making some sort of value judgement about their integrity or intelligence or whatever. Because I'm not. Try to believe me?

*sadness*

Oh, Susan, the government analogy... was if anything, trying to explain to David why I wouldn't just DROP the blind reading thing already. Because that was the only place in the circle where I thought one could effectively do anything...

And maybe I was trying to be cute.

Oh. This is kinda why I didn't want to talk about this in a public forum...

I'm not mad at you! Promise. I just... I also hate discussing this in public, or possibly at all, because I recognize that I'm coming at this just as an editor and not as a writer, and to some extent that puts me outside of the realm of useful opinions on the problems writers face. You know?

How can I put this? . . . Of course people have unconscious biases, and of course we all think we don’t. Editors are people, people have unconscious biases, ergo, editors have unconscious biases.

However: Editors are people, people have unconscious biases, ergo, editors have unconscious biases.

A writer, on some level, wants an editor not to be a person. A writer wants an editor to be a machine. A mechanism for infallibly and impartially selecting the best story. It’s natural for a writer to want this. But the fact that it’s natural doesn’t make it any less irrational.

And, again, the stakes are just not that high. Considering how low the stakes are, considering that we’re talking about a marginal art form in a marginal genre, that most of us are working in just for the love of it . . . I actually value the editor’s chance for that “initial burst of glee” more than I value, as a writer, having my story impartially considered. I’d rather the editors were enjoying their work. Even if it means I have to work harder.

Also: Aaaaaaargh. The readers, the poor readers! Will no one think of the readers???

...okay, David.

And so, what does a reader want? Bearing in mind that the stakes aren't all that high.

What, you think I know? Actually, I was kind of hoping somebody else would do the hard part . . . (Although I’m also afraid that’s probably not the hard part.)

But what Matt Cheney wants (or doesn’t want) in that quote up there would be a place to start.

What does a reader want?

To be entertained?

What's bugged me about this wider conversation is the assumption that GVG/F&SF ought to be publishing a certain kind of story. If F&SF had a million monthly readers like the New Yorker does, I would be much more willing to agree that the magazine bears some sort of obligation to publish a diversity of voices. But it seems to me that F&SF is a small-time operation and GVG is just buying the stories that he thinks his readers will like. Doesn't the intangible "wow" factor of a story win the day, regardless of the author's name, gender, race, sexual orientation, bibliography, etc.? Maybe I'm naive, but I think it does. And how do you tell an editor that s/he ought to be wowwed by a certain story?

I also think each market has its own unique flavor. For me, SH features more experimental and edgy stories than F&SF; F&SF features the best of the mainstream. And who knows, maybe the majority of women are writing stories too cutting edge for F&SF. But I feel like I know what kind of stories to expect at both of these places. As a reader, I could care less about the author's gender and I care a great deal more about the words on the page. Would I adore M. Rickert's stories any more or less if it was Michael instead of Mary?