Gender issues in SF - going backwards?

This week saw me reading about the Strange Horizons 2014 count of gender representation in the reviewing of SF stories.  (Niall Harrison, 30th March 2015).  See Strange Horizons for the full data.

The first figure I noticed was the number of US books received by Locus for review : 58% by male authors, only 39.9% from female authors.  So even before we get into the murky area of equality of reviews women are at a disadvantage.  The UK figures are even worse : 68.7% of books submitted by men, only 31.3% by women.  Julie Crisp suggests that's because women don't submit as much, but I'm not convinced that's the problem,  I regularly submit, and am regularly rejected.

What we don't have is any analysis of the types of subject matter magazines and publishers favour.  We know that in contemporary women's fiction the importance of women's books is downplayed.  Hard-hitting books written by women dealing with abuse, prostitution, dysfunctional families, are being given pink and fluffy covers and classified as chick-lit.  That same subject matter in a book written by a man is considered a serious literary contribution.  I am beginning to suspect a similar bias is at work in the acceptance of SF short stories for publication.  Certainly I've not read any real feminist stories recently, anything that radically challenged patriarchal culture.

So here's my challenge to the number-counters.  I want an analysis of the types of story subjects that  get published.  Is there a pattern of magazines rejecting stories with strong feminist elements?  I suspect so, but I can't prove it.  Trying to do such an analysis would be far harder than just counting numbers, but would be extremely rewarding.  This is the VIDA count, version 2.0.

I've read far too many published stories by women that don't see the universe from a feminist point of view.  So many that seem to think the same restrictive forms of relationship will endure into the future.  There have been massive changes In our own culture as women have gained legal equality, and started to earn their own money.  We have choices we didn't have a century ago. In a century's time relationships will be radically different again, and I want to see that reflected in the SF I read.  Is anyone up for that challenge?

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more about her at www.wendymetcalfe.com