The benefit of gender neutrality, however, was not lost on me and was the main motivation behind K rather than Kate. My favorite genre is Sci-Fi and I have a strong science and engineering background from both my education and previous work. Even so, I was afraid that my writing wouldn’t be considered as seriously if the reader knew up front that I was a woman. Was my concern justified? I’ll admit, I was also curious to see what assumptions people would make if they didn’t know my gender.

As it turns out, even though there is more than one post on my blog that should lead someone paying attention to the conclusion that I’m likely a woman (like reference to ‘my husband’, so either I’m a woman or a gay man)—and at no time have I ever deliberately written something to imply that I’m a man—there have been multiple comments, on my blog and elsewhere, where the readers’ assumptions are clear. For example, I’ve been referred to as ‘old chap’, and in one review of my serial novel, Dosterra, any reference to ‘the author’ was accompanied by the personal pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him’.

I certainly agree with the above comment that children, male or female, will make a lot of assumptions about their abilities based on the feedback they get from their parents (and society as a whole) and those assumptions will stick with them for their entire lives. How many girls didn’t take an interest in science (science fiction, monsters, insects or other ‘gross’ things) because they were Daddy’s little princess, and how may boys didn’t take cooking or dance lessons because they were Mommy’s tough little man??

Great job. Now go back to marketing. Nothing to see here…

My advice for getting more women to write sci-fi is to tell little girls that there’s nothing more feminine, more appropriate for a young lady to learn, than science. And, of course, to show them that it’s easy and fun to learn. Keep at this pro-science campaign for about 10 years and 10 to 20 years from now we’ll have a new generation of women scientists and sci-fi writers. Then they will find a way to genetically engineer men to wash their own socks and cook their own lunches and especially to take their wives out on a proper date every week even 50 years after they got married. And yes, with all that extra spare time from having to do less washing and less cooking, they’ll be writing and submitting a lot more stories than men.

“How do we get more women to submit?”

(also, thanks for the peek inside the numbers! Fascinating.)