Two Thirds Empty Is Half Full

Strange Horizons have published their annual SF Count which aims to draw attention to imbalances in literary coverage. You will be unsurprised to learn that coverage of and by men still disproportionately dominates. However, 2013 was a relatively positive year for the BSFA Review.

35.77% of our reviews were of books by women, considerably up on last year’s 26.8% (and the year before that. Whilst this clearly isn’t parity, it is actually above the baseline of 33.1% of SF books published in the UK. (Obviously that baseline isn’t completely reliable so please check the SF Count itself for their full methodology.) It is also by some margin the highest figure out of Foundation, Interzone and SFX, the other UK publications.

The same is true of the percentage of our reviewers who are women (a third, up from 23.5% the year before). Given Vector has far more reviewers than the other publications this also means that, in absolute term, we have many more female reviewers. But again, this is a long way off parity and doesn’t even meet the baseline of the approximately 40% of the British Science Fiction Association’s members who are women.

For the first time, this year the SF Count also includes data on black and minority ethnic writers and reviewers. You will see Vector comes dead last on the first of these measures having published only five reviews of books by BME writers (although given the number of reviews we publish – 133 last year – the proportion is always going to be relatively low). On reviewers, it would be nice to say we are doing rather better since Vector is sitting comfortably in the middle of the table. And yet Vector only had two BME reviewer. So actually we only look good in comparison to the seven magazines who had no such reviewers at all (including Interzone and SFX).

Unlike with women, there is no baseline of either books received or membership numbers to compare these figures against. The UK is a very white country – 87.1% – something that is easy to forget if you live in London and spend a lot of time online. My suspicion is UK SF fandom is even whiter. One of Vector’s BME reviewers was my roommate at World Fantasy Con in Brighton last October which was very handy for me as, whenever I wanted to find him, I just had to scan the dealer’s room for the only brown person. That isn’t quite true – American author and editor Bill Campbell was dilligently manning the Rosarium Publishing table and reviews of two of his books will be in the forthcoming issue of the BSFA Review – but there were definitely more women with pink hair present than there were people of colour.

This isn’t intended as an excuse. The UK, including publishing and fandom, is not entirely white and, indeed, is becoming less so. It is important that an organisation like the British Science Fiction Association reflects this fact. I’m grateful for the SF Count for holding me to account and I hope the membership will do the same. Please do contact either me or Donna Scott, chair of the BSFA, if you are interested in reviewing for us or have any thoughts about how the BSFA and its magazines can do more to promote equality and diversity within SF.