Hugo Awards: Shaped that way for a reason
“If in the written fiction categories, no selected nominee has a female author or co-author, the highest nominee with a female author or co-author shall also be listed.”
This is a proposed amendment to the Hugo Awards introduced at a Worldcon business meeting earlier this month. The amendment was immediately nuked from orbit. (It was the only way to be sure.)
Today I came across a post by Yonmei, talking about why she proposed the amendment. Two of the points she makes:
“Books by women are less likely to be reviewed by than books by men (this applies even to Locus – in fact, it was Locus that was offered as a specific example at the Broad Universe panel on Sunday morning at the Worldcon.) … So a book by a woman is less likely to become known because of a good review.”
“In the overall pool of readers, there is still a bias by men against buying ‘women’s books'”
She also points out that every year from 2000 through today, one or more of the Hugo award categories has ended up with an all-male shortlist. Never in this time period has there been an all-female shortlist.
This leads to two questions:
1. Is this actually a problem?
2. If so, how do we fix it?
Regarding #1, I’m reminded of the all-male Manthology, and I can already hear the same arguments being prepared. Yes, it’s statistically possible to get an all-male (or an all-female) list at random. I believe the fact that it keeps happening so consistently, and so one-sidedly, is a problem.
#2 is harder. Yonmei’s amendment would have guaranteed no more all-male shortlists. However, I’ve read several female authors already protesting that they wouldn’t want to be on the shortlist simply because of their second X chromosome. (On the other hand, how many male authors make the shortlist thanks to that Y chromosome? Not that their stories weren’t good, but would they have made the final cut in a truly gender-blind situation, or would they have been the runner-up while a female author took their spot?)
Changing the Hugo rules has the advantage of being quick. If that rule had passed, 2009 2010* would be the last year to have an all-male shortlist. But as I look at this, I don’t necessarily see a problem with the Hugo rules; I see a problem with the genre as a whole, with readers and editors and reviewers and so on.
I do believe things are moving forward, but it feels like a slow change, requiring an awful lot of work and discussion and awareness. And sometimes we do have to change the law first so the culture can follow. (Desegregation being the first example to come to mind.)
I don’t have an answer, except to keep pointing this stuff out when it happens. Keep challenging the assumption that it’s normal to have male-dominated award ballots, anthologies, and so on. Keep ridiculing the fact that so many projects purporting to represent The Best of our genre are still dominated by the White Boys Club, because The Best of our genre is so much better than that.
For myself, keep expanding my own reading. I grew up reading white male authors, and those habits are still present, which means I need to make a deliberate effort to break them. (This list on the Tor.com site is a good start.)
As always, I’m very much interested in hearing what the rest of you think.
—
*Thanks to Steven Silver for the rules clarification.
Jonquil
August 26, 2009 @ 11:28 am
Yonmei has said that her chief purpose was to start discussion, at which she has admirably succeeded.
As a practical matter, I’d vote against it (if I attended Worldcon, which I don’t) for the reasons cited by the female authors. People who are already eager to dismiss female writers would be handed an easy excuse if they knew that there was a hard quota for female representation.
Which leaves us with changing hearts and minds, which is harder. I’m trying to read more works by POC (I was always pretty good at reading works by women) and in general not to stick to the familiar.
” I believe the fact that it keeps happening so consistently, and so one-sidedly, is a problem.”
I am very grateful that you keep saying this. Patterns matter, and addressing each individual instance as if it were unique is a deliberate choice to ignore most of the data.
Yonmei
August 26, 2009 @ 11:56 am
Thanks for the link, Jim.
What I thought was also a fairly telling statistic wasn’t just the number of all-male shortlists (out of 60 categories considered, 6 for each year, 20 of them were all-male shortlists) but how often were the numbers of women and men shortlisted approximately equal?
In 7 years out of the last 10, in 5 categories out of 6 (never in Best Short Story), 8 times in total (out of a possible 60), the number of women shortlisted has been roughly equal to the number of men shortlisted – 2 women to 3 men, or (a couple of times) 3 women to 2 men. That’s 13.3% for equality, against 33.3% for men-only: the other 53.3% all have minority numbers of women.
Jonquil, I knew even as the proposal was being workshopped and drafted that I could list off the top of my head women SF writers who would vehemently disagree with it – but as I say in my post, I didn’t do it for the writers, but for the voters. I don’t get to vote for the Hugos that often: I would rather not be using my vote promote the idea that the best writers in SF/F are men.
Daniel
August 26, 2009 @ 12:31 pm
Yeah, that’s an interesting situation. I certainlly don’t have an easy answer.
While I certainlly agree with women getting their deserved recognition (the first fantasy novels I read were co-written by Margaret Weis and I loved all the Harry Potter books), I’m uneasy about someone being nominated only because they fit a certain catergory.
I know if I were personally in such a situation, I wouldn’t want to be nominated for an award only because I filled some kind of quota (no idea what that would be though, “We don’t have enough half-Irish authors this year.” “Eh, just nominate Hogan.”). Say I won said award, and I found out after the fact I was only on the shortlist due to an amendment like you mentioned, I’d feel pretty down about winning.
That is a tough one.
Couldn’t they just have a larger field of nominees?
Yonmei
August 26, 2009 @ 6:28 pm
David: I’m uneasy about someone being nominated only because they fit a certain catergory.
Unless that “certain category” they fit is white and male, hm?
Say I won said award, and I found out after the fact I was only on the shortlist due to an amendment like you mentioned, I’d feel pretty down about winning.
I’ve never heard of any man who won a Hugo in a year he was on an all-male shortlist feeling pretty down about winning since he only made the shortlist because he fitted the “certain category” of male science-fiction writer.
Really. Never.
Apparently, this is only something women are expected to feel bad about: men seem to take affirmative action as their just deserts.
Jim C. Hines
August 26, 2009 @ 8:18 pm
I imagine the backlash to something like this would be ugly in the extreme. Though I agree that the discussion has been a good thing.
Jim C. Hines
August 26, 2009 @ 8:20 pm
I didn’t want to copy and paste everything from your blog post, but I very much appreciated all of the research you did and shared from the past ten years. The numbers make it very clear this is a pattern, not just a one-time fluke.
R.S.
August 27, 2009 @ 8:50 pm
When it comes to literature awards, I don’t think there’s any reason the judges need to know anything about the authors when they are making selections. If the judges don’t know who wrote a given piece, then they can’t discriminate, right?
Jim C. Hines
August 27, 2009 @ 8:53 pm
The Hugos aren’t awarded by a panel of judges, but by the vote of members of the World SF Convention. Since we’re talking about the most popular published works of the previous year, it would be incredibly difficult to make it a blindly judged award.
I like the idea in theory; I just don’t know how you could pull it off.