Going back to the time I asked for recommendations, let me share the numbers. These are the recommendations I got, listed by how many separate nominations each got:
5 - Mark Lawrence, Scott Lynch
4 - Brandon Sanderson, Brent Weeks, Naomi Novik
3 - Brian McClellan, Peter Brett
2 - Adrian Tchaikovsky, Brian Staveley, R. Scott Bakker, Ben Aaronovitch, Allan Batchelder, Steven Erikson, Django Wexler, Chris Wooding, Michael Fletcher, Jen Williams, Neil Gaiman, Erin Morgenstern, Patrick Rothfuss, Daniel Abraham
1 - Nnedi Okorafor, Kirsty Logan, Kameron Hurley, Sarah Pinborough, Julia Knight, Emma Knight, Robert Redick, Miles Cameron, Michael Sullivan, Den Patrick, Kate Elliot, Robert Jackson Bennett, NK Jemisin, Alex Marshall, Jo Walton, Christopher Buehlman, Michael Livingston, Tad Williams, Jeff Salyards, Stella Gemmell, Laura Resnick, Ilona Andrews, T.O. Munro, J.P. Ashman, Matt Colville, James Cormier, Barbara Webb, Graham Austin-King (last 6 all SP)
I got these off 21 different people; some here, some SFFChronicles, some BestFantasyBooks.
There's 49 total. 16 of them are women - a third.
But only one woman in the top 5, only three in the top 20 and if I removed the nominations of just three of the people I got them off, then 18 different people would have given me a list of 34 names to check out of which only 5 were women.
Its not like the community gave me a list that was made up of a third women. The community gave me a list with not even a fifth made up of women and a few very knowledgeable, very helpful people gave me 15 nominations - almost a third of the list - of which just over half were women.
To isolate it to here - I got recommendations from 6 people (not counting GR Matthews' SP recommendations as I'm too lazy to count them properly). I got 25 different authors recommended. 8 were female. 3 of the female nominations came from Arry (out of 9), another 3 came from magisensei (who gave me an all female short list). Remove them and I got 13 recommendations from 4 people of which 2 were women. One is Jen Williams, who has a very high profile here for obvious reasons (and who I see barely mentioned elsewhere), the other is Naomi Novik.
That's just one small not particularly scientific sample of course. But it is evidence that female authors are being forgotten/ignored by the community.
And, of course, there are other bits of evidence. Like
Mark Lawrence's poll, as pointed out by cupiscent.
Or we can look at the
poll we did for The Gem Cutter, in which 18 names made it through nomination with only 2 women included. Or some of the book battles - 5 out of 32 in favourite series written by a woman.
Lawrence's blog is particularly interesting though as there's a guy in the industry pointing out that, despite the fact the publishing industry is female dominated, the perception is that women sell less well. Hence the push for androgynous names on the cover. Robin Hobb picked Robin deliberately for a pen name because its androgynous (and her career was not plain sailing as Megan Lindholm). Joanne Rowling writes as JK Rowling - gender neutral - and Robert Galbraith - straight up male pen name. It would be interesting to see a count of new fantasy authors from the major publishing houses by gender.
People say we read what we like - how do we know what we like? I'm guessing there's very few people here reading multiple reviews of every new book coming out. Virtually no one here knows what manuscripts are getting rejected at the final hurdle as they're seen as good but difficult to market. Our choice of what to like is filtered before we ever get to make it.
And its filtered by an industry that is wary of pushing female authors in certain subgenres because they're seen as harder to sell and by a community that's putting up the numbers I've just pointed to.
Who knows what's out there that we'd like if people just gave it that push to find our attention?