Middle Grade Bloggers as Fans, Gatekeepers, Partners of the Industry, & Members of a Gender-Imbalanced Community, Part 2

This post is a continuation of a discussion started yesterday, which you can find here.   In this second half, I talk about the gendered space of Middle Grade (MG) blogging (with data gathered from my weekly round-ups of MG sci fi/fantasy), and how it pertains to community and author-blogger relationships

Thought 3:   MG blogging feels safe and friendly.  A large part of this might be that we are united by common interests and concerns.  For many women, a larger part still may because it is primarily a female space, which isn't something to celebrate, but something to question.  A look at some data shows a troubling gender imbalance in the world of Middle Grade science fiction/fantasy blogging.
 

When I picked an all-female roster of panelists in Elementary/Middle Grade Speculative Fiction for the Cybils this year,  this was not because I rejected equally qualified male applicants.  It was because no male applicant (and there were few of them over all) put my category as his first choice.  There are many, many more women blogging about EMG SF than there are men.

The world of children's book blogging is dominated by women (presumably because of the female tilt of  librarianship and elementary school teaching).  The authors who engage most directly in a friendly fashion with me and my blog are also women, and I don't think I'm alone in this.  The  publishing reps who have reached out to me over the years have (I think) all been women.  Clearly the women are the ones with the most "community capital" (the phrase used by Renay, the author of the post linked to Part 1, in an earlier article about gender and blogging in the adult sci fi/fantasy world-- Communities: Beyond Traditional Horizons).

The one area in which there is gender equality is in the breakdown of the writers.   I have been compiling a list of all the EMG SF books compiled by Kirkus from October 16 to the present-- 84 of the authors were male, 81 were female, and 7 books had co-authors who were male and female.  Does this translate in an equal number of reviews in the female-dominated blogging world?  No, and this was an unpleasant surprise.

I looked at the past sixteen weeks of reviews of  MG  sci fi and fantasy from around the blogs (I gather them in weekly round-ups).  286 books by men got reviewed.  381 books by women got reviewed, though I can't 100% swear that I counted exactly right (if anyone wants to do counting of their own, I have 196 weeks of round-ups--go for it).  Since I see each week as a personal challenge to find as many reviews as I can, I don't think I'm guilty of gender favoritism there...That being said, these 16 weeks may be slightly skewed by the "Holly Effect"-- Doll Bones, by Holly Black, and Rose, by Holly Webb, have been reviewed lots more than other books.  Still, it seems like a dramatic difference.

I then looked at the gender breakdown of bloggers hosting authors-- authors invited to share their words at personal blogger spaces.  I include interviews and guest posts in my weekly round-ups, so I counted the number of female vs male authors back through March 2013.   I'm not confident that this is great data--I might well have missed lots of posts from blog tours, because sometimes when I'm doing my round-ups I find blog tours overwhelming and just don't try to get all the links.  I didn't count posts at author group blogs, or industry blogs, and I didn't count guest posts that were basically publicity, like character introductions.    I found 53 instances of guest posts/interviews from male authors,  and 103 instances of female authors.

I think publicists are just as likely to arrange blog tours on behalf of male authors as they are for female ones, so that's not a likely reason for the disparity.  It might, instead, come from female authors feeling more comfortable personally asking the predominantly female bloggers, with whom they have established friendly relationships, for guest post/interview space.  This is how my own most recent MG interviews happened.   Or conversely,  (female) bloggers may feel more comfortable contacting the female writers. 

Out of curiosity, how many of those of you who are bloggers (male or female) have been approached directly by a man about a guest post or interview (excluding self-published books, for several reasons*)?  I went back through and checked my own blog--in the past seven years, I myself have hosted/interviewed three women and two men who asked me directly (although neither of the guys were authors of MG books), which is not all that meaningful.

My final question was whether the Cybils awards, given by bloggers (some of whom may be author bloggers), have gender skewing in the middle grade categories.   Because I'm pretty comfortable with the baseline of female/male authors in MG sci fi/fantasy being 50-50, but don't know about regular MG,  I just looked at the sci fi/fantasy short lists:  14 men shortlisted vs 24 women over the past six years.  This gender disparity wasn't conscious bias (which I know because I was there for most of them).   And I don't think there's conscious bias in the reviewing and guest-post data either.

Do these three bits of data (possibly faulty) reflect a more subtle phenomena of women writing books that appeal to women, and so getting reviewed and honored by women more?  Extending this line of thought, do "boy books" appeal less to the grown-up women who blog, and so get reviewed less?  Does this in turn contribute to men not feeling part of the MG blogging world, and therefore not wanting to start blogs of their own, or, if they are authors, not making the personal connections with the bloggers that would allow them to feel comfortable asking for guest post space and being reviewed more, etc.?   Or perhaps the guys who write MG sci fi/fantasy don't actually read it for their own pleasure, and so aren't interested in reading lots of reviews of it, and chiming in on the conversations? 

I dunno.   And I've never talked to a guy about it.  Because I have no close blogging friends who are guys, and I don't know any male authors well enough to ask.

But anyway, here is this gender imbalance, and it troubles me.  What to do?

Here are some things I will try to do: 
--make sure I am not falling into an unwitting gender imbalance on my blog (I'm not, currently, but in large part this is because most of the books I review are new, so the even divide of the genders in publishing keeps me on track).
--bravely (because I am shy), reach out to some male authors whose books I enjoyed and ask them if they would like to be interviewed on my blog. 
--make sure I'm visiting and commenting on the blogs written by guys, and not living in a little bubble of best blogging friends who are girls. 

Tentative final thoughts:  Middle Grade blogging is a comfortable place for women, with a blurry wall between authors and bloggers (quite a number of them are wearing both hats), and generally friendly relationships with publishers.  Though some blogs are more "fannish" and some are more directly tied to the industry of writing and publishing, many bloggers move freely between the two spheres.    One reason for the cordial atmosphere is a mutual respect based in part on a shared agenda--promoting good children's books and encouraging literacy.   Another reason may be that it is very much a female space--a safe place for women to speak their minds--which is nice for those inside it, but pretty questionable over-all. 



*I excluded self-published books because these authors are in much greater need of word-of-mouth publicity that traditionally published authors, and may contact hundreds of blogs seeking exposure.