Charts showing gender analysis for Hugo/WSFS award finalists
Hugo Award
Best Novel / Best Novel or Novelette
Commentary
Ty Franck has the
slightly dubious honour of being the only Hugo Best Novel finalist without
his own Wikipedia page. Of course, the
James S. A. Corey
joint pseudonym does have a page, so it's not like he's completely
ignored.
Blackout/All
Clear in 2011 is counted as two separate titles, as this is how
these books are recorded in ISFDB. This will in turn cause an inconsistency
of one in the female author count between these stats and some others.
Best Novella
Commentary
In the period 1960-1966, novellas were eligible for the short-lived
"Best Short Fiction" category, alongside novelettes and short stories.
The results for that category are included in the "Best Short Story"
chart further down this page.
Best Novelette
Commentary
Please see the Best Short Story/Best Short Fiction category below, which
covers novelettes (via the latter category) for the missing period of
1960-1966.
Also note that 1958 is covered by the earlier Best Novel/Best Novel or
Novelette category, although no records exist of the finalists for that
year outside of the winning (short) novel.
Best Short Story / Best Short Fiction
Commentary
As documented on
Wikipedia,
there was no Best Short Story category between 1960 and 1966. The results
for the short lived "Best Short Fiction" category - which also
encompassed novellas and novelettes - has been folded in here.
Best Series
Best Editor Long Form
Commentary
The following few editor and fan-writer/critic/artist heavy categories are
likely to have a higher-than-usual proportion of human-names derived gender
and unknowns, as:
Many of these people don't have a "proper" entry on ISFDB.
For those that do, there may not be relevant gendered categories for
their activities.
Quite frankly, some of these areas are outside of my knowledge and
interest, and so I haven't been active in looking to add/fix missing
data in ISFDB or Wikipedia for these people. Of course, the benefit
of using publicly available data sources is that if you
are someone who is knowledgeable and interested in these areas,
you can help fix things for future iterations of these
charts :-)
Best Editor Short Form
Best Fan Writer
Best Non-Fiction Book / Best Related Book / Best Related Work
As with similar "newbie" awards such as
Locus
Best First Novel,
there's a visible difference in the gender balance here versus the "regular"
fiction categories, which are (presumably) nominated by the much the same
voter base - the other Hugo fiction categories have 75-25 to 66-33 M-F ratios
over their history, whereas this award isn't too far off 50-50.
That stat is a bit misleading though, as this award has only been around
since 1973, whereas three of the four Hugo fiction categories have been
around since the 1950s. A more reasonable comparison might be to compare
the 1973-present period for all of these awards, which I haven't (yet)
done - although I will note that Best Novella dates from roughly the same
period - 1968-onwards - and has a 69-29 M-F ratio.
Commentary