That's a relatively small number when you look at how many women are writing in the other areas, especially YA. You can see that when it comes to science fiction only 22% of the submissions we received were from female writers. The facts are, out of 503 submissions - only 32% have been from female writers. The percentages supplied are from the five hundred submissions that we've been submitted since the end of January. Tor UK has an open submission policy - as a matter of curiosity we went through it recently to see what the ratio of male to female writers was and what areas they were writing in. The sad fact is, we can't publish what we're not submitted. And I do wonder if those writing the pieces are aware who is actually commissioning these authors? So you can imagine there's a slight sense of frustration each time I see yet another article claiming that UK publishers are biased towards male writers. That means that every genre publisher in the UK has female commissioning editors and 90% of the genre imprints here are actually run by women. To name but a few there's Bella Pagan who works with me at Tor UK, Gillian Redfearn at Gollancz, Anne Clarke at Orbit, Jo Fletcher at Jo Fletcher Books, Jane Johnson and Emma Coode at Voyager, Cath Trechman at Titan and Anne Perry over at Hodder. My colleagues (and competitors) are a set of brilliant, intelligent and hard-working women, who have loved genre since they were kids, have fought their way through the ranks, have extensive lists, love their jobs and don't compromise on the quality of fiction they publish. I'm just one of a fair few female editors in this particular area. Yes, a female editor commissioning and actively looking for good genre - male AND female. Every time I've seen one of these articles I get a little hot under the collar because, guess what? I work in publishing. And usually, the blame always comes back to the publisher's doorstep. In the last few years I have seen numerous articles deploring the lack of female SFF writers, in science fiction in particular.
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