It being International Women’s Day (and before anyone whines, International Men’s Day does exist — it is in November), here’s a brief visibility update.

Most of you will probably have seen VIDA’s report on the visibility (or lack thereof) of women in mainstream literary magazines during 2011. What you may not have seen is this post which looks at books reviewed in popular SF&F blogs.

There’s certainly potential for selection bias here, and the sample size is quite small, so I’m not going to claim that this proves anything. It is, however, yet another data point. And to my mind the key statistic is this: 41% of books reviewed by women bloggers were by male authors; only 18% of the books reviewed by male bloggers were by female authors.

I note that my review selections of late have been very deliberately slanted in favor of female authors.