Blog Overlord Post #4: Statistics on the visibility of Women in SciFi
Here is the beginning of some research that I am doing in which I have compiled the names listed across various rankings of “Best SciFi Authors” in an attempt to gain insight into how the public views the Female authors of Science Fiction. Ill put the data that I have so far below. Overall I’ve found that amongst internet rankings Women make up about 9% of the spots on “Best Sci Fi Authors of all time” lists. This is disproportionately small to the fact that 15% of all Sci Fi writers are estimated to have been Female (Lisa Yaszek, “The Future is Female” Introduction). This 9% figure is also extremely small to the percentage of women that have been named Grandmasters of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Of the 38 recipients of this prestigious award, 9 have been women, which amounts to 24% (Andre Norton (1983) Ursula K. Le Guin (2002) Anne McCaffrey (2004) Connie Willis (2011) C.J. Cherryh (2015) Jane Yolen (2016) Lois McMaster Bujold (2019) Nalo Hopkinson (2020) Mercedes Lackey (2021)).My final project will look into some of the history of Science fiction and venture into why these discrepancies occur.
Overview of my findings so far:
| Total in Lists | 117 | |
| Count of Men’s Mentions | 106 | 90.60% |
| Count of Women’s Mentions | 11 | 9.40% |
| Average Birth of Men | 1926.8 | |
| Average Publication of Men | 1966.7 | |
| Average Birth of Women | 1913.9 | |
| Average Publication of Women | 1953.3 | |
| Excluding Shelley Birth | 1933.3 | |
| Excluding Shelley Publication | 1973.2 |
Amount of Women included in Each List used:
| Total In List | Women in List | |
| 10 | 1 | |
| 10 | 0 | |
| 8 | 1 | |
| 36 | 4 | https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/greatest-science-fiction-authors-v1 |
| 17 | 3 | |
| 36 | 2 |
A full list of names is included in this Spreadsheet, and it might also work as a good sci-fi book rec list! Albeit a bit too heavy on Male authors: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-4ODpeW2F3W8z-xou1Lj_dJ_Chu4-04i3OlIVwal5c0/edit
Cheers,
SB
Great to see you are doing this research! And Yaszek (a friend of mine!) has done great work on this topic for years. Let me know if you’d like to ask her any questions!