By now, I imagine many of you have seen Publishers Weekly’s roundup of the ten very best books of 2009, a list which just happens to only include male authors. Sure, the girls made it into some of the secondary lists, but the ten best? All boys.
I would also check out Lizzie Skurnick’s response at Politics Daily, which included this bit from PW: “We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration . . . We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz . . . It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.”
So here’s my question: What should PW have done when they realized they had come up with an all-male list?
We pause now for the predictable response.
“You keep your quotas off of us, you damn, dirty PC police!”
Right. Moving on, the thing I don’t get is that the folks at PW say they were disturbed by this, but they don’t appear to have done anything about it. Did they ever take that next step and ask, “Why, if we were truly ignoring gender, did we still come up with an all-male list? We’re talking less than a 1 in 1000 chance of this happening purely at random*, which suggests maybe we weren’t as gender-blind as we thought.”
Our own biases are hard to face. It’s easier and safer to turn the blame outward or make excuses:
- It’s just one list, and we have girls in some of the others!
- Maybe more men published good books this year.
- It’s the story that counts, not the gender/race/etc. of the author.
- Women helped to make this list, so it can’t be sexist!
- Maybe women should be proactive and start writing better books!
I could go on and on listing reasons that basically amount to “It’s not my fault,” and “I’m not sexist!” We could spend the whole month debunking most of those reasons.
But in the end, Publishers Weekly published this list. They were aware enough to recognize something wasn’t right, and I give them props for that. But that’s much easier than actually taking responsibility. We can say, “Oh look, a list of all men. That’s gonna be a problem, because those bloggers are going to raise hell that we didn’t include a token woman.”
Or we can stop making excuses and try being accountable for our own choices and behaviors. We can say, “I tried to be gender-blind about this, but ended up with an all-male list. Huh. I didn’t consciously try to pick only male authors, but maybe I’m not as gender-blind or unbiased as I thought.”
Nobody’s asking for quotas. Me, I’m just asking people to grow up and take responsibility for their choices. Yes, we’re talking about an industry-wide issue that affects publishing on many different levels. But the industry is made up of individuals, and every one of us, myself included, has our own biases and prejudices. We can ignore them and make the same tired excuses, or we can face them and try to do better.
We all mess up. I just wish more folks would own up to it when it happens.
—
*Assuming a 50/50 breakdown of male and female authors.
Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.
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Comments
And I think it's good that we're generally not being consciously or deliberately discriminatory. But so much of this is learned habit, it's the stuff that we don't think about because it's so automatic. Then we get so defensive that someone dared to accuse us of being sexist that we never make the effort to examine our behavior and really think about all of those underlying assumptions and habits.
And when, oh lordy WHEN, are publishers going to realize that these meta books about writers and journalists are getting really damned old. It's amateurish, it's lazy, and it's a one-trick pony among fledgling novelists. If I was an editor, I would say, "Neat story about a writer. Now, why don't you write another one which actually uses some imagination. Hmm?"
Also "we ignored who had the buzz?" Oh, bullshit. Unless they were doing a blind testing, which is impossible with books for obvious reasons, they were influenced by the buzz, by the conversations, by their own preferences... that's why it's branded list, because it reflects the tastes of that brad's editors. Nothing wrong with that, but that means owning up to the biases that come with said tastes and said brand...
The only book I'd consider getting from that list is the Age of Wonder, and that's being kind.
This reminds me of the top ten lists you'd find in Games magazine or any other publication where they fail to provide details on how the list was selected. Trying to avoid hype and hoopla and gender and genre isn't the same as actually doing it, and if you fail to put your selection criteria on display then you ought not be taken seriously.
(NB: I am female and I write stories chock full of overt physical conflict. I loves me my fight scenes!)
It's all well and good to say "we ignored such and such" but if your list turns out all male (or all female or all dogs for that matter) then you need to figure out what it is about your evaluation that's influencing the results.
What this list should have woken up is a notice to the publishing companies that they're promoting very unequally. News outlets can hardly be blamed for this.
It's entirely possible that the judges were perfectly neutral, but the selection pool was radically weighted in favor of the boys. (This is, of course, highly implausible, and the more reasonable explanation is that both pool and judges have biases.)
Those who know me well probably have some idea of how I personally feel about this, but I'm afraid I'm constrained from discussing those feelings in public.
The defensiveness instead ... just looks bad. Really bad.
I would have had a *lot* of respect had they chosen to go the route you suggested. (Even more if they actually followed through...)
The other thing I find really interesting about all these lists is that out of dozens and dozens of books, I've heard of maybe three or four and read, as far as I can tell, not a single one. And I do read quite a bit (two or three books a week on average, I would guess).
Of course, I spent as much of my degree as I possibly could reading Old English poetry and Renaissance drama, so I'm perhaps not quite their target demographic either ;)
It's hard to believe that a list produced by a gender-blind process would end up all one gender.
Maybe I should go home and count how many female and male authors I have on my bookshelves and find out how my personal buying habits tally. I've never really thought about buying by gender, but this post makes me curious about my own preferences.
I'm curious which books didn't make their top ten. I'm guessing "Her Fearful Symmetry" was the literary ghost story, but I'd like to know what the cookbook and the sci-fi book were.
I'm glad that they were disturbed by the final result and were confident enough to say that they were disturbed by it. I'd like to see what their determining factors were; if there was anything in them that somehow skewed toward the male writers, and if it was, what it was, because it's just as much a stereotype to say that male writers write about x subject in x manner and females don't.
Looking at a larger sample of my reading, I *think* that was a statistical fluke, but I'm glad for the reality check.
I do know my choices skew heavily toward white authors, which is an area where I'm working to broaden my reading.
And yeah, like you, I'd be very curious to know what sort of criteria were used to compile that final list.
(I'm not sure if they do this list every year and if they consider books from November of the previous year to October of the current year or something like that. If so, I retract my sarcasm. Most of it, anyway.)
The male/female breakdown might be a part of that.
Instead, I have to say that, as a reader, I simply find the lists by genre much more useful than a list that's supposed to be a general collection of best books of the year, of any kind. Others have already weighed in on the quality of the books on the list, so I won't, but I think the inherent problem with it is that you simply CAN'T say that those ten books are the best of the year, by anyone, about anything, because of a) the incredibly small group of people deciding this, b) the self-selected nature of the incredibly small group of people deciding this, and c) the determination of the incredibly small group of people deciding this not to reveal any information about the selection criteria. If we don't know what they usually like, we don't have any way of knowing how and why these books were selected. And that can make a huge difference, in addition to the tiny sample size of the group.
In fact, I don't see the point to the list at all when you've got the other lists by genre, which are more diverse and just generally more useful to most readers because no one really goes to a book store and asks a customer service rep, "What are the best books that have come out this month?" The customer service rep will want to know, "Well, what do you like to read?" And then the rep will help the customer find a book by genre.
That's what it's all about, really. Those may be the best 10 books to people who like to read what those people like to read. But that's not a Best Ten for everyone, not by a long shot, and pretending otherwise is just ridiculous. Plus they've made themselves targets of another GenderFail controversy for no good reason, even though they did recognize ahead of time that the shit could hit the fan because of the list.
I'm going to call that "BrainFail".
This seems like a good time to look for factors further back in the pipeline -- whose correction would have a greater and longer impact. Do agents and editors choose to publish more books by men, or the kind of books that are supposedly more often written and read by men? If so, why?
Short-term, it might be helpful to choose contest judging panels including some women of the school of le Guin or Russ. If they agree with the male judges, that's a sign that there may be problems further back.
1) Do they have a history of doing this kind of thing?
2) Is the panel of judges gender neutral?
3) Are there other factors involved (maybe the problem is the publishing industry not publishing enough books of that sort by women or something else entirely)?
Yes, the chances against it are astronomical, but I'd give them the benefit of the doubt until some kind of bias can be shown. I actually think it's kind of cool in this PC day and age (even I'm guilty of being PC now and then!) that they recognized the coming firestorm and yet stood by their choices. Refreshing.
2. Yes
3. Probably
It's amazing how these million-to-one chances seem to crop up nine times out of ten, isn't it? (Exaggerating the numbers for the sake of the Pratchett reference, but hopefully the point is still there.)
I don't ask for quotas, necessarily -- but I note that when the gender ratio turns up more women than men, I suddenly hear many of the anti-quota people starting to sound quota-friendly.
Sigh.
I wish I was surprised.
None of the above applies. And as it happens again and again, with award lists and TOCs, I reach outrage overload. I wonder each and every time why women still don't have a level playing field, and what it will take to make that happen.
Talent obviously isn't enough. The glass ceiling is still there, they just hung a few plants and adjusted the lights so that you don't notice until you smack right into it.
Then I go back to writing, because really, other than a troop of ninjas and a case of C4, I'm not sure how we can shatter that sucker.
The very idea that a group of people sat down, looked at the list they'd made, saw it was all men--and, as I've said in other places, not just all men, but all books ABOUT men and generally aimed at a male audience--shrugged, and said, "Well, gee, I guess no women wrote good books this year. Oh well, nothing we can do about that," is ridiculous.