The nominees for this year’s Hugo Awards have been announced – congrats to one and all. A few people have mentioned the dearth of female nominees in the fiction categories. This seems a reasonable observation, even though I’m always cautious about gender-based breakdowns of such things. It did make me think to take a look at one or two other things, and I was quite surprised to see the case with winners for Best Professional Artist Hugos. Since the first ‘professional artist’ award was presented in 1955, exactly one woman has won the award, and then as part of a team (Dianne Dillon). So, in fifty-one attempts at presenting the Best Professional Artist Hugo, across a fifty-two year period, only one. Very odd (see the list of artists here).
Edited to add:
A quick look down the lists of nominees also shows that only three women – Dillon, Rowena Morrill, and Val Lakey-Lindahn – have ever been nominated for the Best Professional Artist Hugo. I haven’t done an exhaustive survey, and I’d never advocate some kind of quota approach to these things, but that seems rather extraordinary. If they’ve averaged four nominees in 52 sets of nominations, that’s three women in over 200 nominations. The only question, I guess, is whether there is an obvious candidate, or candidates, who’ve done science fiction artwork, who have been overlooked. If so, it would be a rather sad state of affairs.
how about the dearth of women all the way down the line?
i will not launch into a screed or bust out “solutions” or stabbing. i will just suggest throwing the list page into http://www.regender.org.
how about the dearth of women all the way down the line?
i will not launch into a screed or bust out “solutions” or stabbing. i will just suggest throwing the list page into http://www.regender.com.
Well there are only a few names and they’ve been frequent winners.
So one could remark that it’s been difficult for both women AND for those men who have not won before.
I’m not so old that I have very many memories of Hugo announcements past, but my limited association with them has always been that the Best Artist Hugo practically came engraved with Bob Eggleton or Michael Whelan’s name on it. (I was quite pleased that Donato won it last year.)
I kinda wish they would nominate artworks instead of artists. Or at least do both artist and artwork.