It seems that yet another white male is saying there are a lack of female authors in SFF, so that’s why SFF movies by women just don’t get made.

No, I shan’t line to the original article, but here is the discussion I came across: Stop Erasing Women’s Presence in SFF

Interestingly, most of the comments are people boggled by the writer of the original article not being aware of, say, JK Rowling. And then the commenter goes off to list their favorite five or ten female authors. There are a LOT of different female authors listed throughout that thread.

So this is where I once again completely geek out.

I read a LOT. You know that.

I also love geeking out. You know that too.

So you might remember that years ago (good grief, 14 years ago) I started keeping track of the books I read, and then later started tracking various information about those books–the gender of the author, the genre of the books, etc.

That means that I have a LOT of data on my personal reading habits. Which I love to manipulate. (Because: geek)

I know this is a confusing chart–I’m looking at two different types of data so I pared things down quite a bit. Here’s how to understand what you’re looking at.

The stacked bar charts are showing the gender of the author: women on the top, men on the bottom, multi-author books in the middle. That pink slice? Women who write under male pseudonyms.

You can see that I tend to read more female authors than male authors in any given year, but that sometimes I read more books written by men, but at no time have less than 40% of the books I’ve read been written by women.

The lines are the genre of the book of read. You can see that I predominantly read fantasy (Green line), but I also read a lot of mystery (red line). As romance is predominantly written by women, that line is pink. (Don’t try to figure out the numbers here, a book can have multiple genres–FREX I have a have a deep love for supernatural mysteries.)

So what is the point of this? It shows you that I read predominantly female authors, and the majority of my reading tends to be fantasy (although some years mysteries win out.)

Yes, I do re-read books a lot, but I am not re-reading the same fantasy book by the same female author over and over again (I rarely re-read them same book twice in a year).

It also shows that genre and gender are relatively independent. Yes, romance novels are mostly written by women. Yes, most comics are written by men. But since most of my reading is of fantasy and mystery, those categories are gender independent.

I have also complied a list of female authors I have read, across all genres.

That list currently has 275 authors on it. If you’re looking for something to read by a female author, I think you’d be able to at least one book on that list you’d like.

So next time some guy says there aren’t any good female authors, you can assure them there are quite a few, and perhaps recommend one or twenty books for them.