Female Reviewers Substantially More Likely To Review Female Authors

But What Does it Mean?

I’m not ques­tion­ing the sta­tis­tics pro­vided. They seem entirely cred­i­ble. Though I’m not sure the sam­ple is actu­ally suf­fi­ciently ran­dom­ized that you could take this num­ber and say it exactly rep­re­sents the entire blo­gos­phere. But it’s ball­park at least.

No, the prob­lem here is I’m not sure what this really means. With­out know­ing at least some of the rea­sons behind the dis­par­ity (and there are sev­eral obvi­ous ones that spring to mind) it’s hard to really process the infor­ma­tion in a use­ful fashion.

Is there even a prob­lem here? Maybe?

We can estab­lish from the sam­ple that there are more male review­ers than female and that inevitably leads to an imbal­ance in over­all reviews.

But what should blog review­ers be required to attempt some level of bal­ance in this area? And if so to what purpose?

I don’t have per­cent­ages for male and female authors in the sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy gen­res. Per­haps that would put this more in perspective?

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lady­busi­ness | Cov­er­age of Women on SF/F Blogs (2012)
lady busi­ness. this is fem­i­nism x it is not scary pet the pretty fem­i­nist pony xx. Cov­er­age of Women on SF/F Blogs (2012). Cov­er­age of Women on SF/F Blogs (2012) · Mar. 10th, 2013 10:46 pm. helloladie…

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5 thoughts on “Female Reviewers Substantially More Likely To Review Female Authors”

  1. Olivio Sarikas
    March 12, 2013 at 17:35

    do i want to say some­thing: yes
    do i want to indulge in a lengthy fem­i­nist dis­cus­sion: nope ;)

    Reply
  2. Justen Robertson
    March 12, 2013 at 17:40

    I don’t see much of any­thing to say about this. There’s not enough con­text to draw mean­ing­ful con­clu­sions. How many books pub­lished by male vs. female authors dur­ing the same time period? How many man­u­script sub­mis­sions vs. pub­li­ca­tions? How many males oper­at­ing under female-sounding pseu­do­nyms (or given names), and vice versa? How many pos­i­tive vs. neg­a­tive reviews by gen­der of author vs. gen­der of reviewer? What gen­der dis­tri­b­u­tion of authors among sub­gen­res vs. gen­der dis­tri­b­u­tion of review­ers for those sub­gen­res (i.e. are some mas­sively over­rep­re­sented sub­gen­res like tolkienesque fan­tasy gender-skewed, and in turn skew­ing the over­all results unfairly)?

    Basi­cally, blog reviews are not a very good proxy for study­ing gen­der rep­re­sen­ta­tion in fiction.

    Reply
  3. Eoghann Irving
    March 12, 2013 at 17:43

    This is essen­tially my prob­lem +Justen Robert­son. I’m open to the pos­si­bil­ity there is under rep­re­sen­ta­tion going on in some areas. I’m not sure if this is one and if so who should be cor­rect­ing it.

    Reply
  4. Justen Robertson
    March 12, 2013 at 17:46

    I’m sure there is, but I don’t think this is a use­ful set of data for teas­ing it out.

    Reply
  5. Steve Caunce
    March 12, 2013 at 19:12

    This would be news if it was male review­ers trend­ing to female artists. Peo­ple pay atten­tion to things that strike up an emo­tional res­o­nance with their experience.

    Reply

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