Firstly Mark R. Kelly has created a new website interfacing to his database of SF&F awards. This is a significant update of his work for the Locus website. I will doubtless be using it regularly. And because of the convention he has adopted for pages it ought to be easy to integrate it to other sites such as the SF Encyclopedia. Thank you, Mark!
And secondly James Nicholl has been looking at data from the Philip K. Dick Award. And he’s asking why, if 42% of nominees have been women, only 21% of winner and 23% of special citations have been women. Could someone with a bit of time and statistical skill run correlations between the gender balance of the jury and the gender balance of the results?
I didn’t so much ask why as point out that it was the case.
Am I condemned to an eternity of stupid typos? “Ask”, not “as”. [Fixed — KS]
I’ve been bean counting on related subjects. The relevant tag is f/m; although I understand that gender is more than a simple binary and try to remember to include when relevant categories other than male and female (feel free to castigate me on this point because while sometimes the sample really does divide into f and m, other times I am just being thoughtless). It started as an attempt by me to figure out where it was I was encountering all the great new female authors of the 1970s; at this point I have concluded it was at novel length because they sure were not allowing women into the boy’s club that was the magazines in any great numbers, nor the annual Best ofs.
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/tag/f%2Fm
Sorry to keep posting on this: one thing I’ve noticed is it’s really helpful to do complete runs or at least long samples; looking at Hartwell and Cramer’s last few years (discounting the TOC for an upcoming because I don’t think it is out yet) and comparing the f/m ratios in their Best Of to the f/m ratios of Dozois, Strachan and Horton make it look like there are two general sets, with the Best Ofs involving vintage editors having a considerably lower f/m ration than the two kids. In fact, it’s more interesting that that; the f/m ratio for Hartwell and Cramer may be dismal (again, discounting that last one, if it is not in print yet) but it’s less dismal than when Hartwell was doing it on his own. Progress!
Absolutely. A single issue of an anthology or magazine can have a skewed f/m ratio for all sorts of good reasons. An extended run is much clearer evidence of bias.