Over this past week I’ve been reading Jo Walton’s Among Others and one of the interesting aspects of the story is that it’s centered around a protagonist (our heroine, Mori) who is an avid SFF reader. This aspect of the book, and the fact that Mori is lame and walks with a cane, like the author, Jo Walton, may be why it was described to me as “self-referential.”

Be that as it may, I enjoy some of the literary reflections in the story, such as Mori’s response to the discovery that James Tiptree, Jr is not a man, but a woman:

“James Tiptree, Jr. is a woman! Gosh!”

Gosh indeed–but what struck me about the subsequent discussion, a la 1979,  around women authors using their own names or male/ non gender-specific psuedonyms is that we’re still having it in 2015.

“I suppose I can see doing that so as to get respect, but Le Guin didn’t, and she got the respect. She won the Hugo.”

What is meant here (I believe) is that Tiptree chose a male psuedonym because she believed her writing would receive a better reception if believed to be a male writer’s work and be taken/treated more seriously. Contemporary analysis of patterns of book publication, reviewing, and recognition suggest that Tiptree had a point then and the same point remains valid today.

Other writers also appear to have shared or share that view. Authors such as CJ Cherryh and JK Rowling publish using initials only, a practice which disguises gender, as do pseudonyms such as “Robin Hobb”, where the spelling of “Robin” is gender ambivalent—in fact I recently met a reader who consistently referred to Robin Hobb as “he.”

On the the other hand, as Mori rightly reflects, “[Ursula] Le Guin didn’t, and she got the respect. She won the Hugo.”

So, too, did such great names of Science Fiction-Fantasy as Lois McMaster-Bujold, Vonda McIntyre, Anne McCaffrey, Connie Willis, Joan Vinge, and more recently Susana Clark and Jo Walton herself (for Among Others, in fact), as well as the most recent winner, Ann Leckie for Ancillary Justice.

So I am inclined to agree with Walton, through Mori, that if Tiptree’s choice was solely about gender then she was “taking the easy option.”

Because statistics or no, so long as women authors hide behind male pseudonyms then I cannot help feel we are giving in, if not outright pandering to the perception that women’s writing is of lesser merit.

Which clearly, looking at the array of Hugo Award luminaries listed above, is not the case.