The 2014 SF&F Count

Yesterday Strange Horizons published their annual statistics on gender and race balance in SF&F. The full article is here. I’m pleased to see that they are now acknowledging non-binary people in the count. The data is only for the US and UK, but as those markets tend to dominate all other English-speaking markets we’re seeing a significant proportion of the Anglophone world here.

There are a few points I’d like to highlight:

  • Involvement of people of color in the industry is still woefully low
  • As usual, the stats for the UK are worse than those for the USA, on both gender and race
  • The proportion of books published by people who do not identify as male was lower last year, in both countries, than in any previous year that the count has been made

Ouch.