Charts showing gender analysis for Locus award finalists
Commentary
Something possibly worth noting for anyone who wants to dig more deeply -
Locus also runs an annual survey of their readership. As I understand it,
it's not a survey of their entire readership, but it is done
at the same
time as the polling for their awards, so you'd hope that there's a pretty
high crossover between the people who voted for these awards, and the people
who responded to that survey.
If there is - or is not - any correlation between gender balance of nominated
authors, and the gender balance of readership, then a clue might be found
there? I've got a couple of issues of the print magazine that contain the
survey results, and they do indicate a notable change in the gender balance
of survey respondents over the past decade. I don't believe the survey
results are ever published for free on
their website, but I believe they are
usually printed in their August-dated issues if you want to
buy a back-issue.
(At least in the issues I have, 10-year historical results for most/all
questions are printed for most (possibly all, I haven't checked) questions
in the survey, so you wouldn't necessarily need to buy up issues from
multiple years.)
Locus Poll Award
Best Fantasy Novel
Best SF Novel
Best Horror Novel / Best Horror/Dark Fantasy Novel
Best First Novel
Commentary
As mentioned in the notes for
the
JWC/Astounding Award for best New Writer, "newbie" categories have
much higher ratios of female finalists/nominees than the "regular" novel
categories that are - presumably - voted on by the much the same group of
people.
As mentioned for the similar Hugo categories, the stats for editors and thus
anthologies are impacted by some of these people not having "proper" ISFDB
entries, and those that do are probably less likely to have Wikipedia pages
than authors.
Commentary