I have said many times that the only way to put an end to the under-appreciation of female writers is to start in school. If children are brought up to believe that only male writers are important, and in particular that boys do not need to read books by women, they will take those attitudes into adulthood where they are much harder to shake off.

My friends at For Books Sake have been taking a look at gender representation in English Literature examinations in the UK. They found to their horror that the syllabus is becoming more male dominated (and more white) rather than less. As the politicians are fond of saying, something must be done.

To read more about the issue, go here. And for information about how you can help the #BalanceTheBooks go here.

Yesterday Juliet McKenna put up a long post looking at the issue of how SF&F books are promoted by Waterstones. She has had some friends doing a survey of stores around the country. It looks like there is some pretty good evidence that the feature tables for SF&F are biased in favor of male authors. This is one of the issues we discussed at the Women & Publishing panel at Finncon, where I noted that the last time I was in the Bristol store the counts were 5/35 for fantasy, and 0/35 for SF. If you assumed that the store staff thought Robin Hobb was a man, the fantasy count would change to 3/35.

Juliet makes some excellent points about how Waterstones are hurting their own sales by this behavior. There are plenty of women who read SF&F. Indeed, as another data point, the majority of members of The Emporium Strikes Back, the SF&F book club at Mr. B’s, are women. But why is the effect Juliet notes happening, and what can be done?

Obviously lack of knowledge by buyers and store staff is a contributing issue. Heck, the SF&F table at my local store has disappeared completely since we’ve had a change in management. But even when there is knowledge it doesn’t always filter through. Last year, when Juliet first started making a fuss about this issue, my local manager wrote to head office asking why she was given so few women SF&F books to stock. The buyer wrote back enthusing about something called Ancillary Justice that they expected to be a big seller. And yet, when it came out, my local store wasn’t sent any copies, and the book still isn’t getting pushed much in any store I have seen despite the heap of award wins.

Then of course there is the whole issue of publishers, the editorial staff of whom appear to be mostly female. Yet they too appear to mostly push SF&F by male writers at the expense of women. At Finncon Elizabeth Bear noted that she found UK publishers much more hostile to women SF writers than in the USA.

With all this in mind, I found this article on Mashable very interesting. It reports on an academic study of middle managers in large US corporations, and looked at how those managers’ performance was rated on the basis of their hiring choices. As a back-up, the study was replicated as an experiment using college students role-playing the senior management, and this produced similar results.

What the study found is that, although the corporations has policies advocating diversity, and although white male managers were praised for making diverse hires, female managers and PoC managers were given negative performance evaluations if they recruited people like them.

This appears to be telling us two things. Firstly prejudice is probably much more ingrained and subconscious than we like to think. And secondly women and PoC who are in a position to improve diversity within in their organizations are likely to damage their careers if they do so. No wonder this stuff is so hard to shift.

Articles about gender imbalance in publishing are ten-a-penny these days. Everyone has an opinion, and I’ve been starting to ignore them unless they have something new and interesting to say. Last night I found one such article: this one.

The article begins by recapping the usual story about the VIDA survey, but it very quickly gets onto asking why men dominate publication stats, and what can be done about it. The usual excuse trotted out for an imbalance is, “we can’t publish what we don’t get,” accompanied by stats showing that men dominate submissions. But why don’t publishers get submissions from women? Rob Spillman, founder and editor of the literary magazine Tin House, decided to dig deeper.

The first thing to note is that Tin House does solicit some contributions. It isn’t clear what the balance of those solicitations is, but Spillman notes that, when he does solicit material, men are twice as likely to send him something.

Beyond that, he also looked at how male and female writers responded to rejection of unsolicited submissions. As of when he was interviewed, 100% of the men that Spillman had sent a rejection letter to had tried again at least once. Only 20% of the rejected women had done so.

What is the explanation for this? Well I’m sure that some people will assume that this proves that women are lazy, stupid and incompetent. If they can’t manage to submit to magazines, how can they expect to get published in them?

Spillman and his team, however, decided to try to encourage more women to contribute. And while they were still happy to accept material from male writers, they stopped actively soliciting them. After all, they didn’t need to. The men would submit anyway. The result was a much more even gender split (42 men and 56 women in 2012).

But wait, surely this is positive discrimination! It is Politically Correct, and hugely unfair to men! Material from lazy incompetents is being encouraged! Surely quality will suffer! (I’m resisting going into all caps here, but only just.)

Here too, Spillman was prepared. His magazine is well thought of in the literary community and regularly wins awards. The 2012 experiment with women writers caused very little difference in the number of nominations for Best American Short Stories, O. Henry awards, and the Pushcart Prize that the magazine received.

So is there another reason why women are so reluctant to submit? Spillman’s explanation is that they are just shy. “You’ve got to draw them into the conversation,” he said. And that is probably true. In most cultures girls are trained from an early age to keep quiet and let men talk. But I’d like to suggest some additional theories.

Willingness to put yourself forward is all a matter of confidence. You have to be confident in your own ability, and you have to be confident that you will be treated fairly.

As far as self-confidence goes, aggression directed towards women who are publicly visible, and the lack of reviews for women writers, clearly aren’t going to help. Women writers expect that, if they are published, they will be held to a far higher standard than their male counterparts, and that will naturally make them reluctant to submit unless they think their work is of exceptional quality.

Expectation of fairness may also be an issue. The more experience you have of discrimination, the more likely you are to expect it in future, and the more likely it is that you will ascribe any setback to discrimination rather than to fair judgement of your work. If you are already used to people telling you that you are no good because you are a woman, or because you are black, or because you are queer, then when you get rejected from a venue you may well assume that discrimination was the reason, and that will lead you to not bothering to submit there again.

I can, of course, see reasons why a major publishing house might be unable to implement the sort of strategies used by Spillman at Tin House. There will be penny-pinching middle managers who are liable to get in the way if additional effort and expense is involved. In these days of miniscule PR budgets, you might prefer to sign someone who is self-confident and pushy over someone who is a better writer but unlikely to promote herself well. You might even run into trouble with your corporate ethics people if you seem to be engaging in “positive discrimination”. Nevertheless, I do think that actively seeking out good quality submissions is likely to result in better quality product.

Whether it will result in a more profitable product is, of course, another matter. If some readers are reluctant to buy books by authors who are female, people of color, queer and so on, you can see why a large, profit-driven organization might be reluctant to sign such authors, no matter how keen editors are on their books.