Surprise
Today I checked out my statistics on LibraryThing, and was surprised to discover that only 17.1% of “my authors” were female (counted by author, not by volume, so J.K. Rowling doesn’t count as seven, for example).
I thought this was pretty low, and imagined a list of explanations. Are more male authors published? More male authors reviewed? Undoubtedly.
And then I thought: science! I wonder if my “connections” (LT automagically finds a list of up to 100 libraries of similar makeup) do better?
(“o/c/u” is “other / contested / unknown”, e.g. Poppy Z. Brite; “n/a” is mostly corporate authors, e.g. Grant Naylor)
On average, my connections do better than I do. A real surprise to me!
In mitigation, two of my 100 connections have near 50:50 ratios, which seriously skews the mean. But this is no excuse: if they can read that way, why don’t I?
I hereby pledge, as of yesterday’s visit to the public library (which is when this thing kicked off in my head), to try out at least as many new female authors as male ones.
