Gender Bias in Publishing Redux

[fibitz]

Most of this is a comment in response to the gender ratios for appearance in major literary publications posted earlier this month at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

I am the editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and the poetry editor for Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. In Mobius, I publish approximately

Comments

[justine_graykin]

This is such a complicated issue, although different people with different agendas try to simplify it one way or another. For one thing, it cannot be reduced to a matter of numbers, because an unquantifiable factor is involved: Quality. How on earth does one correct for that? There is too much variation in opinion about what constitutes "good" writing

[fibitz]

I like your point about whether gender parity is a must. As long as women are being accepted in proportion to the submissions ratio, the responsibility for the disparity in submissions should lie with the writers themselves and those from whom they take instruction-not editors. It grieves me that self-inflicted discouragement among women appears to be part of the reason for that disparity. As Susan U. Linville wrote in this essay, "If women are to achieve true parity in this field, they must finish their work, submit their work, and persist in marketing their work."

One other point which I, and others, often fail to consider: in this day of e-mail and online submissions, my perception of gender in all but a few individuals whom I have met is based solely on their names and on the use of "her" or "his" in bios. We have no idea what the real gender ratio is.