Despite my concerns about Philcon’s harassment policy, I am planning to be there all weekend–even though I received absolutely no response to the email I sent the convention chair outlining my concerns.

While I”m on the subject of Philcon, I’s also like to go on record as being uncomfortable with the gender balance of their program.

By my informal count, program participation is comprised of 121 men and 74 women.

I also looked at all the programming tracks except for Main (mostly Masquerade stuff), Filk, and Gaming, excluded all screenings and demonstrations and most workshops (the exception was the Family track) and came up with the following numbers; I’ve bolded the gender that dominates each track:

• Signings: 18 hours, 24 men, 9 women (all the signings are two-person except the GOH ones)
• Literary: 55 hours, 155 men, 86 women
• Readings: 16 hours, 14 men, 2 women (excluding the Broad Universe Group reading)
• Anime: 15 hours, 38 men, 9 women
• Art: 8 hours, 15 men, 5 women
• Family: 9 hours, 9 men, 18 women
• Comics: 8 hours, 27 men, 4 women
• Costuming/Cosplay: 3 hours, 3 men, 13 women
• Cutting Edge (Technology): 6 hours, 14 men, 6 women
• Fandom: 9 hours, 26 men, 11 women
• Media: 13 hours, 52 men, 13 women
• Science: 10 hours, 33 men, 7 women
• Total: 170 hours, 410 men, 183 women

This means, on average, those 121 men have 3.4 panels each while the 74 women only have 2.5 panels each.

I recognize that this analysis does not take non-binary people into account. My apologies for the erasure–it is not my intent but it is the result and I am happy to incorporate non-binary gender data into the dataset if there is anyone on programming affected.

I will do a more detailed analysis after the convention when I have a paper program I can mark up. I’m also planning on attending some programming and my goal is to do a thorough con report.

I’ll also have physical copies of Jacqueline Koyanagi’s Ascension to give away–watch Twitter for details.

Onwards to the links!

• Orson Scott Card: Mentor, Friend, Bigot
• Me, Authorship, and Ender’s Game
• Jesus and fundamentalist dress codes
• Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980): The Forgotten Woman
• Amazing series of posts at Stacked this week: A Closer Look at The New York Times YA Bestsellers List, Part 1 and A Closer Look at The New York Times YA Bestsellers List, Part 2. I also commend Kelly J for not using pie charts. Bar and line graphs are definitely a much better choice for this kind of data.
• SFF in Conversation: Rachel Bach on Upsetting the Default
• Amazon’s porn censorship is inconsistent and unfair
• Whatever Happened to Poe?  The formatting on this is terrible and I wish there were citations. If the details are true, this is horrifying.
• Little Libertarians on the prairie and this fantastic rebuttal which smashes it to pieces: ‘Little House’ Is Not a Big Libertarian Conspiracy
• Nazi trove in Munich contains unknown works by masters
• Marvel Comics Introducing a Muslim Girl Superhero I’m not a comics reader but this is super exciting!
• Background of Marvel’s “Thor: the Dark World” (an unbiased recap) These recaps are a delight and joy forever and ever.
• “I was into Loki before it was cool” Erica Stratton, are you secretly me? I also was a weird teenage girl reading books about Norse mythology.  Getting a translation of the Prose Edda via ILL into my small township library that was still operating on a card catalog was, truly, an epic quest. I also had this book.  And this one.
• Women and the Internet: Part One
• It’s a Man’s Phone And this is why I love my iPhone–it fits in my hand. My husband’s phone is one of the larger-screen Android phones and it’s just too large.
• Science of hair: The roots of accomplishment My apologies, this is apparently behind a paywall and I didn’t notice because when I first saw this, I was at day job and apparently that gives me full access to the site.
• Police Told New Zealand Gang Rape Victim She Was Asking For It WHAT. (Obviously, trigger and content warnings for this link.)
• ‘Anti-Rape Wear’ Reinforces Every Rape Myth You Can Think Of
• The SF/F Community: An Essay This is lovely.
• Always Go to the Funeral As is this.
• Laurie Anderson’s Farewell to Lou Reed “I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.”
• Notes From Tamms Prison This was hard to read. It’s about supermax prisons.
• Values Towards Ethical and Radical Management After the week I’ve had at the dayjob, I just can’t help but read this and sigh sadly.
• Surviving the post-employment economy
• Battle Scars What’s the most rejections a single piece received before it found a home?
• Palaeontology: The truth about T. rex Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.
• Giant Platypus Found, Shakes Up Evolutionary Tree
• Looking into the heart of light, the silence
• There’s No Such Thing This just really hit home for me. In a way I wasn’t expecting.
• Can There Be Hokey Without Pokey?
• Bog butter: a gastronomic perspective (via) This sounds indescribably gross.
• A long post about the power of making things
• The Reader: War for the Oaks I love love love this. I especially love Eddi’s Apartment and Outside First Avenue (this one actually made me tear up a bit).
• How Twitter Hijacked My Mind I can download my archive and I’m a bit scared to see my numbers–I was a very, very early adopter of the service (I joined right when it started; my user number is in the low five digits) but didn’t use it for a long time–I really have only started to love Twitter in the last 18 months or so.
• “We are not Amazon franchises”: booksellers respond to Amazon Source Or, more succinctly in the words of one bookseller: “They can go fuck themselves.”