Why Women Engineers Aren't Enough

I like hard science fiction and space adventure stories, but there are times when they make me cringe. The way they represent women is one of them. I'm not talking about stories from ages past here, but ones written in the last few years. Modern writers know there's a problem with sexism in the genre, so they find a solution...

...they make their women into engineers (or some other traditionally male-dominated job).

This seems great on the surface. She has a responsible job. She'll act in a calm and collected manner when the engines explode. Everyone will comment on her competence.

At the same time, she's part of a plot like this...*

• A team of four people are sent to Mars. Three are men. One is a woman. An accident means the woman is stranded in a cave and the men have to rescue her.
• A women and her husband are astronauts. He's chosen for a mission to Venus. Something goes wrong. She sits and home and waits while some men go and rescue her husband.
• A female engineer is trapped on a broken spacecraft. The rest of the crew are dead. But don't worry - some men are on the way to rescue her and fix the ship. She sits and waits for them to arrive.
• A woman is held hostage by terrorists because of her awesome technical knowledge. A team of men rescue her.
• A woman is the best engineer ever. Everyone says so. Something goes wrong with one of her machines. She has to ask a man to fix it.

The plots have one thing in common: the female characters are completely passive. A damsel in distress is still a damsel, even if she wears a engineer's uniform. A woman waiting quietly at home is being passive now, even if she was supposed to have saved ten star systems in her youth.

It wouldn't be a problem at an individual story level. I'm not suggesting that women never need rescuing** or never end up waiting at home. When it happens in ten space adventure stories in a row, I'm asking questions. Why couldn't astro-wife captain the mission to rescue her husband? Why don't the rescue crews have female members? Why couldn't the woman stranded on the broken ship repair it? Surely the best engineer in the world can fix her own creations?

It's as though it's okay to give a woman a responsible job, as long as she isn't any good at it. Other characters can say she's good at her job, but that's not the same as seeing her succeed.

You don't make a female character strong by making her an engineer***. You make her strong by giving her an active role in saving the day.



-

* I've changed details to protect the innocent. Should you know of a story exactly like one of these... it wasn't the story I meant, but it proves the point anyway.

** Of course, there are passive and active ways to react to a rescue. Leia in Starwars is an active damsel in distress. When they rescue her the first time, she grabs a blaster and starts shooting stormtroopers. When she's rescued from Jabba's floating platform, she uses the chain she's tied down with as a weapon.

I'm always amazed by stories where the woman stands and watches the fight. You don't let your loved one get killed by the bad guy. You do something about it. Pick up a chair and hit the bad guy over the head. Do something.

*** You certainly don't need to be an engineer to save the day, which is another issue with the idea of engineer = equal rights. There's no reason why a woman in a traditionally female occupation couldn't save the day. An ordinary housewife who decides to pick up a ray gun and rescue her husband would be an interesting character.

My First Poem: Pigeons

One of my first poems was uncovered in a recent clearout. I was probably about six when I wrote this. As you can see, I already had the idea of non-rhyming poetry. Sort of.

An untitled poem about pigeons (click for fullsize):



On the back, more pigeons:



What it says:

I like pigeois do you?
flying in a vaes. my mum
like pigeois do you? evey pigeoi like
pigeois

For extra hilarity, note that the teacher corrected the last instance of 'pigeoi' by adding an s to make it a plural. The rest was apparently okay.

Translated into English:

I like pigeons, do you?
Flying in a flock. My mum
likes pigeons, do you? Every pigeon likes
pigeons!

I didn't know what an exclamation mark was, but if I had, I'd have used one. Vaes really does mean flock. When confronted with a word I couldn't spell, anything could happen.

I hope you like pigeons too!

Making Websites Better (Poll)

'Tis the season for improving things. And you can help! Below is a poll about my website, Polenth's Nothing. You can select multiple answers.

Feel free to expand on your answers in the comments (or talk about the things you like on the site... if you want more fiction, which story is your current favourite? Etc.)

What would you like to see improved at Polenth's Nothing?

Rewarding Writer Tantrums

Fairly recently, an author decided to attack a reader who'd one-starred her on Amazon. In the process, the author constructed a whole conspiracy theory about the reader recruiting people for the anti-author cause. It ended with the author threatening to call the FBI (what the FBI thought of that one, we'll never know).

The whole thing led to a musing. One reason this author meltdown received a lot of attention was because Neil Gaiman tweeted about it. He has 1,419,776 followers*. I couldn't help but think: most debut authors would love for Neil to link to them.

But well-behaved authors are less link-worthy. It's not as funny to watch someone behaving professionally. You don't get the same train wreck fascination from seeing an author being polite to fans. Yet, when you think about it, these are precisely the people we should be rewarding with links.

That isn't to say it's wrong to link to the person stirring the hornet's nest. It can serve as a warning for what you shouldn't do. It can be the start of a conversation about why you think the hornet-stirrer was wrong. Or perhaps an excuse to draw your characters as stickmen.

It just seems bad to link to the hornet-stirrers more often than the better behaved authors. I've seen a number of bad behavers go viral in the writing community, often due to poor treatment of fans or rants about how other authors are evil**.

It's much rarer to see a good post or story go viral. People often don't pass them on, even if they enjoy them. A good behaver has to do something amazing to go viral***. Or they have to be the victim of an attack by someone behaving badly.

The bad behavers just need to drink a glass of vodka and let the verbal diarrhoea commence.

Maybe it's time to go out and link to something which isn't a train wreck****.


-

* At the moment of drafting the post. It'll be different by the time you read this.

** Usually because the other authors got a book deal and the ranter didn't. Clearly, the only way this could happen is a corrupt publishing industry failing to recognise their genius. Or the evil authors are trying to keep them down. Maybe both.

*** And often something purposefully intended to go viral, like this YouTube video about how not to promote your book. Or of you like a bit of bounce, you can learn how publishing works.

**** As a starter, I rather liked this piece of flash fiction (Brass Canaries by Gwendolyn Clare). I have a weakness for stories told from non-human points of view (especially if the non-human is artificial).

Dates for the Short Storyist Diary

Before getting back to the usual blog mix of occasionally informative posts, and other random stuff of debatable usefulness, 'tis writing diary time. There hasn't been enough of a new year for personal news, but there's plenty going on in the markets.

January means many markets re-open for submissions, so I've been trawling the lists for possibles. One anthology submission opening I missed was Triangulation. Their theme this year is 'End of the Rainbow' (submissions closing in March 2010).

On the one hand, I yayed, because I already have a draft of a story about the end of the rainbow. And on the other, I sighed, because you know what theme is going to be sent to every other market after rejections from Triangulation... editors won't want to see another rainbow again.

The new science fiction magazine Lightspeed has opened for submissions, ready for its June 2010 opening. They're rejecting very quickly at the moment (about a day) and pay good rates, so worth a try.

Other than that, it's mostly the usual crew of magazines reopening, including Strange Horizons, Star*Line (who also have a new forum) and Kaleidotrope. Crossed Genres is looking for steampunk stories this month.

Go submit stuff! And good luck.

The Fungal Truth!

Oh no, Google auto-complete knows the truth about my minions!

(Yes, I am working hard writing and not playing around on Google)