Why All Female Contributors?

Following up on a previous post, I wanted to explain why I decided to make EV #14 all female contributors. I hope this isn't seen as just a marketing trick or ploy.

Going back to the beginning of Electric Velocipede, my contributor list has been predominantly male. I've been gently chided about this in the past by different people. For the most part, I hadn't thought much about male/female ratio in the magazine. I accepted stories and essentially published them in the order I accepted them. Most of my submissions came from men, so I was publishing a lot of male contributors.

I wanted to increase the number of female writers I was getting submissions from, so I started courting them. For a while, I didn't do any more than court here and there and felt that was enough. Then I realized that the issues that had a more 50/50 blend of men/women sold better. I was still creating the table of contents based on a "first accepted, first published" basis. But maybe that wasn't good enough any more.

I was accepting enough subs that I was building a backlog of sorts. I no longer needed to follow "first accepted, first published." I could spend some time with submissions and actively select what went together. I could strive for a more consistently 50/50 blend of men/women contributors.

Just to explain a little more, it's not that I select stories just because they're written by a woman. The stories still have to meet my standards for selection. I also don't actively reject pieces because they're written by men. I still see the majority of my submissions from male writers, but I have certainly seen the percentage of female authors go up.

Even as I was thinking of actively planning to have a 50/50 blend, I still had issues from the old system. I might be thinking along one set of lines, but what was coming out in the issues didn't necessarily reflect that. This really hit home for me last year at Wiscon 31 where I had 12 pieces out of 14 (13 out of 15 if you include the cover) contributed by men. I was very cognizant of the fact that I was at a predominantly female convention that had cut its teeth by tackling women's issue in genre, and my current issue was pushing the old standard of all men all the time.

I wanted to do something about this. I've gotten a lot of support over the years from women, and I always say that I want to publish more women writers, so I figured it was time to put my metaphoric money where my mouth is and publish an issue of all women contributors. As a relatively new and relatively unknown publication, I felt it behooved my needs to not only say that I wanted more female contributors and solicit stories, but to actually make the effort to publish more female contributors. And what better place to bring this issue than to Wiscon?

Some will see it as a publicity stunt*. Some will say "Where's the all-men issue?" (see #5**, #10, and #12**) But I prefer to see it as a celebration of the talent of female writers that I'm seeing. I would be more worried about this if the issue wasn't fantastic.
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* I see every issue as a publicity stunt: choosing which authors to put in it, trying to get more established writers, getting a great cover, running ads, running subscription specials, etc.

** Issues #5 and #12 each had one female contributor. #5 was a double-sized (at the time) issue that had more than 20 contributors.