Do statistics matter?

In my comments to yesterday's post, I made reference to the statistics collected by Sisters in Crime. That organization, dedicated to raising the awareness of female authors in the mystery field, conducts what they call the "Review Monitoring Project."

They collect data on dozens of publications, breaking down how many books by men are reviewed, versus how many books by women. (They aren't explicit about whether or not they only count books from the crime genre, but I suspect that they include everything.) Their mission is "to make sure women are reviewed as often as men."

Here are the stats for the two publications I review most frequently for:

Publication                   Percentage Male       Percentage Female
Chicago Sun-Times         64.46                      35.54
Philadelphia Inquirer       59.49                      40.51

The average for all the publications they track is: 56.23% male, 43.77% female.

My personal stats for 2006 were: 61% male, 39% female.
My stats for 2005 were: 55% male, 45% female.

I always make a conscious effort to review as many books by women as I can -- not because of statistics like this, but because I try to provide the best service possible to my readers, and reviewing books by only one sex or the other wouldn't do that.

Something about the whole project makes me uneasy, though. I recognize the importance of overcoming biases whenever possible. If those biases exist regarding review coverage, we need to identify them and figure out ways to overcome them.

But is it important that we have a rigid breakdown where half of all books reviewed are written by men and half by women? (Several of the publications they track have a precise 50-50 split between the sexes, which hardly seems like it could be accidental.)

Should the books themselves be the determining factor, or is the sex of the author a valid criteria for deciding what gets reviewed?

Since I do consider the author's sex when deciding what the write about, I suppose that's my answer. But I'm not sure it's the appropriate one.

Comments

[GB]

While some of these initiatives have the heart in the right place, it surprises me that no one dares criticize the way they take political correctness to absurd extremes. Even if the case was that female crime writers are publishing as many books as their male counterparts, this wouldn't make any sense.

By that same token, why don't we start demanding that out of those review columns, 14 percent of the reviews be devoted to Hispanic authors and 12 percent to African American authors (their respective percentages of the country's population)? I think that good female authors can stand on their own merits and by wanting every review to look like a United Colors of Benneton poster you're only hurting the chances of talented yet lesser-known writers (male or female) to gain more exposure.

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