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The Guardian reports on a new study which has found that
The world of speculative fiction publishing is plagued by "structural, institutional, personal, universal" racism, according to a new report that found less than 2% of more than 2,000 SF stories published last year were by black writers.
The report, published by the magazine Fireside Fiction, states that just 38 of the 2,039 stories published in 63 magazines in 2015 were by black writers. With the bulk of the industry based in the US, more than half of all speculative fiction publications the report considered did not publish a single original story by a black author. "The probability that it is random chance that only 1.96% of published writers are black in a country where 13.2% of the population is black is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000321%," says the report.
The editor of Fireside Fiction goes on to say...
"Fiction, we have a problem. We all know this. We do. We don't need numbers to see that, like everywhere in our society, marginalisation of black people is still a huge problem in publishing ... The entire system is built to benefit whiteness – and to ignore that is to bury your head in the flaming garbage heap of history."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @09:52PM
...we don’t have access to submission-rate data concerning race and ethnicity either overall or by individual magazine...
So you have no real data to justify any conclusion about racism, but you'll proceed anyway.
In the first binomial distribution we ran the data assuming that submission rates of black authors are equal to the proportion of the black population in the United States, which was 13.2% in 2015
Using similar thinking, you would assume that 50% of applicants for nursing jobs are male and therefore the lack of male nurses is due to discrimination against men.
we created a second binomial distribution assuming that the submission rates of black authors are actually equal to the sample average of 1.9%. Under this assumption, which is the most charitable to whiteness as possible, some magazines still have a very unlikely proportion of black authors represented in the sample.
This is not the most charitable assumption possible -- it is a neutral assumption. Is it really "charitable" to assume that people aren't racist? It could be that only 1% of of submissions are by blacks but 1.9% of published articles are by blacks because of affirmative action (aka racism against whites) by publishers. Is that not possible? Let's analyze this silliness anyway. They conclude that there is racism because for some publishers the number of publications by blacks is substantially below the average of 1.9%. Does that not imply that there is an equal amount of racism against whites (all those publishers publishing more than 1.9% by blacks)? Here is a crazy idea: What if the percentage of submissions by blacks actually varies from publication to publication? Publishers could be completely color blind and you would still see variation in the percentages if there was variation in the submissions.
Now the question: Why the hell would a publisher even know the author's race? Are authors submitting their works in person?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @11:01PM
You're asking for proper statistical analysis from these yokels when half the pre-publication articles that I review lay out statistical analysis strategies straight outta Imagination Land. Optimist.