There’s a particular misconception about the Strange Horizons fiction department that I’ve seen kicking around in a few different places, and I just want to get one clear definitive statement out into the dialogue: we do not have any intentional editorial practices that favor female authors.
Look, we know the numbers as well as our critics do. The gender breakdown for our published stories doesn’t match our submissions percentages–we’re tracking disproportionately high in female authors. We know this. We’re not doing it on purpose. In fact, we’re actually kind of troubled by it. (There’s a typical kind of moment at the end of our editorial meetings these days, where someone points out that we’ve just agreed to buy three stories by women and only one by a man, and we all kind of groan, oh no, not again.) We had a discussion once, a few months ago, about whether there was anything we could do to fix this, but it’s tricky. I’ve always been very proud of the diversity of our author pool, given that we have a strong representation of both women and people of color without ever having conciously let the author demographic influence our buying decisions. I’ve explained this, when asked, by saying that the most important thing we did was make it clear in our guidelines and mission statement that we were interested in seeing work from underrepresented groups–we are, quite possibly, drawing from a different submissions pool than the other SF magazines.
And, being entirely honest, I’m sure that there’s a lot of editorial preference bias. All three of us are likely to enjoy stories set in non-Western cultural environments, all three of us are readers who are kind of put off by future or alternate worlds populated entirely by middle-class white men, and some of us are also readerly predisposed to liking stories with real emotional impact, often family-relationship impact. (We also are extremely put off by stories with embedded racism and sexism, which is another factor. There are a billion factors–I’m brainstorming here, and only on my first cup of coffee for the day.) There’s no reason at all why these story types have to be linked to certain author demographics, but even if there’s no causal relationship, there’s an undeniably strong correlative one.
In any event, I doubt that the editorial preference factor is going to change any time soon. Just like some other magazines (cough) seem to have a weak spot for stories about old men having supernatural experiences that help them reflect on the lives they’ve led and women they’ve loved, our magazine seems to have a weak spot for stories about, I don’t know, whatever we have a weak spot for these days. Editorial preference/bias happens. I’ve been trying to remember to be more encouraging in the rejection letters I send to male authors, in case that helps re-balance the numbers. Mostly, though, I just wanted to make sure that we’re all clear on one thing: the current imbalance is not, repeat not, the result of any purposeful or intentional action on the part of our fiction editors. Hope that helps.
Posted Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 9:58 am. Filed under: science fiction.
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