[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

Is there a source for the figures?
Perusing the fiction shelves of my local bookstore, I don't notice a gender discrepancy.

Casual appearances can be deceiving; did you glance and say "that looks about even," or did you count? There's a tendency to think that about 1/3 inclusion of a minority group is "equal," and an actual 50/50 balance is "minority taking over." (I can probably track down a source for this; the keywords are hard to search for & I don't have links in my bookmarks.)

Baen lists 213 authors, of whom approx. 56 are female. (I couldn't establish Terry England's sex, and Poppy Z Brite is ftm; not sure whether to categorize by current gender or at-time-of-publication gender.)

Female authors dominate a tiny handful of categories of genre fiction; they have a harder time getting published in nonfiction.

Over the past four decades, the proportion of women among both first and senior
physician-authors of original research in the United States has significantly increased.
Nevertheless, women still compose a minority of the authors of original research
and guest editorials in the journals studied.

(New England Journal of Medicine, July 2006)

The data show that at the elite law schools, the percentage of
women on the faculty averages 28%, very close to the national average
of 30%. Presumably, in a perfect market, the best scholars are at the best
law schools, and the best journals publish the best scholars. Given that
the percentage of female authors is 20.4%, there is at least the possibility
that gender bias.
...
In the one comment providing hard data from a “top tier” law
review, it was reported that 36% of submissions (in 2005)
were from women

Research paper at Brooklyn Law School, 2008

Women make up about one third of political scientists and are earning 42 percent of Ph.D.'s awarded in the discipline. But research presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association indicated that, in publishing, women lag far behind men.
...
...14 leading textbooks in American government. She found that they collectively had 31 male authors and 5 female authors.

Gender Gap in Publishing

it’s official: The New York Times really does review more fiction by men than by women. Far more. Over about two years, from June 29, 2008 to August 27, 2010, the Times reviewed 545 works of fiction—338, or 62 percent, were by men. During that period, 101 books got the “one-two punch” of a review in both the daily Times and the Sunday Book Review—72 of them were by men.

The READ: Franzen Fallout (Article posits that women may write more fiction than men, but includes genre fiction like romance in that assumption.)

I'm looking for statistics on non-academic publishing, and wow, they're hard to find. I may have to just start assembling a spreadsheet.