Where are all the female authors?

This evening I decided to conduct a wee experiment. I was going to take a picture of all the speculative fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, alternate history, horror) books I owned that were authored by men, and then I was going to take a picture of all the speculative fiction books I owned that were authored by women. The pictures below are the result:

 

That’s men on the left, and women on the right. Now, a few notes on my “methodology”: This only represents the speculative fiction portion of my library and only includes my physical books. In other words, literary fiction, thrillers, mysteries, and non-fiction books are not included, and nor are my ebooks. I’m fairly sure that the split along gender lines would be roughly the same.

I have to admit to being a bit shocked at just how few female-authored sci-fi and fantasy books I own. I mean, I knew there was an imbalance, but having it presented visually made the rather dire situation on my bookshelf strikingly obvious. I even had to pop in a picture of a rather dapper bunny rabbit just to make the books a little less lonely.

What makes this sad state of affairs even worse is that is also completely avoidable. There have always been fantastic female speculative fiction authors, and now every year there are more and more truly excellent women authors being published in sci-fi, fantasy and beyond. And so I have decided that it is time for some affirmative action.

Now, I don’t want to suggest in any way that the only reason to read books by female authors is because they are written by women. They are excellent books that deserve to be read on their own merits. However, it’s a sad fact that I am stuck in a rut of (usually excellent) speculative fiction books written by white men. Many of these books feature strong female protagonists, and that is worth celebrating, but we also need to celebrate women telling our stories in our own voices.

My task for the rest of this year is simple: read only (mostly) books written by women. I’m going to alternate new books from 2016-2017 with older reads that have either been on my backlist for far too long, or that I really need to reread. Ideally, to broaden my experience even further,  as many of these books as possible will be from outside the US (just because that’s where most of the books I already read are written) or by women of colour. I would appreciate any and all suggestions you might have for me!

The first book on my list is Company Town by Madeline Ashby. The protagonist is also a woman, and (bonus points) Madeline is Canadian, and the book is set in Canada.