Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-24-2009

[andrewducker]

• Fox hat ad inspires comedy event
  They're building a comedy festival around one of my favourite ads! And I had no idea it was Rich Hall in the ad!
  (tags: advertising comedy scotland)
• First amateur HD Video from the edge of space
  Attach a HD video camera to a balloon. Send it right to the edge of the atmosphere. And back again, when the baloon pops!
  (tags: space video balloon)
• If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw
  Able to spot 80% of the truth-tellers and 87% of the liars by looking at their drawings of a scene.
  (tags: psychology lying)
• British Fantasy Society admits lazy sexism over male-only horror book.
  And well done to them for not trying to bluster their way past it.
  (tags: scifi writing feminism sexism fantasy)

Comments

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I read the Guardian article about the British Fantasy Society yesterday, and I didn't really get it. Anthologies should be compiled on the basis of interesting content, not quotas and tokenism. Obviously you'd hope that interesting content and representative demographics coincide, and indeed they usually do, but there are going to be occasional exceptions because of simple statistical variation. Should interesting content really be sacrificed in these cases in order to give the impression of representativeness?

How many authors in the anthology were black? How many gay, transexual, disabled, over 60, under 30? If the answer to any of those is "none", is that also a shocking omission to be profusely apologised for?

The BFS chair says "this kind of lazy sexism is unacceptable" - presumably meaning publishing an all-male 15-interview anthology. At what point does it become acceptable? Five interviews? Two? One?

What surprised me was not that people were offended (people are always offended about something), but how self-condemnatory the BFS people are being. None of them seem to question the implication that the gender of the contributors is the most important thing to consider when compiling an anthology. I agree that if they did something wrong it's far better to apologise sincerely and not fall back on pseudo-apologies like "I'm sorry you were offended", but I'm not convinced they did do something wrong.

[andrewducker]

They missed out a large number of authors doing good work because they didn't think to look outside of the specific favourites of the person doing the interviewing. And they've admitted that. Someone (back when this first blew up) dug out some stats and worked out the chances of a random selection of 15 horror authors all being male. It's was so close to zero that it just wasn't funny.

Ignoring the fact that a large chunk of your readership (and authors) are female is just dumb, and the kind of thing that you can't expect to get away with nowadays.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

They missed out a large number of authors doing good work because they didn't think to look outside of the specific favourites of the person doing the interviewing.

That's a completely different issue, and not the one people are complaining about, or apologising for.

If that were the issue, then if the anthology were gender-balanced but consisted of one individual's favourites that would have been just as bad, and if it were all-male but decided by a large diverse committee that would have been fine. I really can't see the people quoted in the article agreeing with either half of that.

[andrewducker]

No - they're complaining that the editor was focussed on one area and because of unconconscious sexism, built into the way that they thought about the genre, they didn't include any women.

If they had had a bunch of favourites which included women then these people would have been happy. If a committee had also chosen to focus entirely on men, and ignored the contribution of women then they would have also been unhappy.

There's the choices they made (bad) and the reasons they made them (bad, because they were so limiting, and only visible because of the bad outcome).

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

An anthology is presumably selected on the basis of some criterion. It may be as simple as "best this year" or "best by a new author" but unless it is specifically "best by female writers" or "most significant by Scottish writers" then the fraction of stories in if from any group should, as a statistical null hypothesis, be in proportion to the representation of that group in horror (or whatever other category) writers as a whole.

Now, here 'in proportion' means 'not so out of proportion as to be statistically very improbable'. To answer your question, for a small anthology of a handful of stories, that makes any analysis meaningless, as the sample size is too small. For very small or under-represented communities, it is also not useful; if an anthology with 10 stories does not contain one from a writer from a community representing 5% of all relevant writers, that says nothing about any bias.

However, if an anthology contains over a dozen stories none of which come from a group representing a sizeable fraction of writers, then the likelihood that this is by chance can be meaningfully calculated as being very low. The definition of a very unlikely event is one that did not occur by chance, so there has been exclusion - be it conscious or subconscious - of that group.

What is worrying here is not just that the BFS managed to come up with an anthology of fifteen stories, none of which were by women, but that nobody involved thought "hang on, is it really credible that none of the many female writers out there produced anything worthy of getting into this". That's the kind of sexism that really needs challenging, because it represents passive and unthinking acceptance of the lack of worth of female writing.

[andrewducker]

Thank you - you put that better than I was managing.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

AFAIK they were interviews, conducted specifically for the anthology, rather than existing stories. If they were stories I'd be saying things like "the stories should be judged on their merit by an editor who doesn't know who wrote them, and the best stories should go in, whether they were written by men, women or spambots."

I assume the subjects for the interviews were chosen on the basis of people the compiler thought it'd be interesting to interview. I asked in my comment above whether the problem was that they were chosen according to the individual tastes of the compiler.