There have always been serious issues revolving around gender parity and sexism in the fantasy community. Whether this is the depiction of women – as little more than damsels in distress waiting for the fella to rescue her – or the fact that many bookshops and even publishers seem reluctant to fully invest in the marketing of books written by women, it is something we are all aware of but have not yet managed to fix.
Thankfully, there are many dedicated and talented people working on raising awareness and it does feel that publishers, booksellers and readers are beginning to listen and take note of how bad things have gotten. One such eye-opening project was the “Waterstones Fantasy Table Gender Count”, where authors such as Juliet McKenna encouraged readers to head down to their local Waterstones, check the featured and recommended tables to see for themselves just how few women are in the mix. Waterstones picked up on the disappointing results (books by women, especially living women, were few and far between) and agreed to look at a number of their methods.
Of course it is an issue far bigger than a single retailer and there’s still a lot of work to be done. Juliet recently blogged that “I got a ‘Top Fantasy Titles’ email from Amazon [this week], offering me fifteen books by men and just one by a woman writer. Female authors are still consistently under-represented in genre reviews and blogs.”
I should add at this point that Fantasy-Faction hasn’t always been innocent of this kind of under-representation either. We’ve always been very good with our reviews and interviews (featuring fairly equal number of men and women writers), but there have been times where we’ve fallen into the trap of focusing on male authors in our articles about the genres history. On the few occasions this has happened it has troubled me, because I know the conventional response from the ill-informed, that “women don’t write fantasy”, is completely and utterly incorrect.
So, when I heard of a project by Sonika Balyan to create a database of women fantasy writers in a bid to show the world that “yes, women write fantasy and always have”, I was excited and really wanted to help bring attention to it. I hand you over to Sonika now to explain why she felt the need to kickstart this project, followed by the impressive document itself:
“I’ve heard from lot of people that women don’t read or write fantasy. It’s interesting to speculate why that is, but what’s more interesting is that it’s not even true. I’m not arguing that there are enough women (yours truly included) reading fantasy. If you doubt that just walk into any bookstore and watch the queue of buyers for an hour. Or go to your nearest book club.
I like to believe that gender has no role in the way we buy books. Of course there are readers who go out of their way to avoid fantasy written by women. But mostly readers are impartial on gender. So we should definitely be seeing more women on the recommended lists. But we don’t. Why? Why is it that we think women don’t write fantasy? Why aren’t more women featuring in our conversation about fantasy?
It might be a bias in publishing industry; it might be a bias of reviewers; it might be a bias of bookshop owners who control display windows. I don’t know the answer. I have my hypotheses, but they are just hypotheses. What I can definitely answer is that women do write fantasy. Really good fantasy.
So I sat down and compiled this list. I do hope this list helps others discover some new authors. I know, I already have.
PS: It’s still a work in progress. I would be happy to receive feedback and recommendations.”
Although the iframe below just about works, we recommend that you click here to visit the original Google document to check the full extent of Sonika’s work out. Also worth noting is that Sonika has added a “male authors with strong female characters” section, which you can access by navigating to the tabs at the bottom.
Do let us know which are your favourite titles and authors from the database. 🙂
