Last week, Paul Cornell (comics, TV and novel writer) stated that, in a bid to get more equal gender representation on Science Fiction and Fantasy convention panels, he was going to stand down from any panel that wasn’t 50/50 or near as and invite a woman to take his place.

Cue an awesome shitstorm of vitriol and support. The main thrust of some feminists’ arguments I’ve heard against this, and in some cases against Paul personally, is that this was ego boosting, man-on-a-white-horse, mansplaining wank and we don’t need it.

Sorry, sisters, but we do. Let’s take a look at the arguments.

1. ‘This looks like it’s a man to the rescue of women, showing us in a submissive and passive light, needing us to be thrust into the spotlight by a man with agency.’

Um, yes. You know why? Because sexism has been so ingrained in SFF over the years, back when it was a male-dominated genre, this is actually our starting point. Editors get fewer submissions from women regarding horror, fantasy and hard SF, the subgenres that are often most applauded by critics (also mostly male). Publishers put fewer women forward for convention guest spots, and female authors themselves look at the gender make-up of panels and step back. I think women haven’t stood up en masse to rectify this because it became the norm. We told ourselves ‘SFF is sexist, so they don’t notice women’ and forgot that arguably – especially when you take account of urban fantasy and paranormal romance – there are more of us in the genre, and hey, we sell more copies. We have as much right to be at those cons, doing those signings, making our voices heard, as the feted men do. SFF convention organisers have shoved women on all-women panels, told us to talk about ‘women in SFF’ and then told us that’s the debate and equality will shake out of that. It won’t. I think, somewhere along the way, we forgot to band together and tell SFF and con organisers to go shove their sexism. Maybe this will help.

2. ‘We don’t need no man sorting this out for us.’

See above. We do. It sucks. That’s the frikkin’ point. SFF wasn’t listening when we were raising our voices. I wish, I fervently wish, that when a woman makes a point about gender inequality, it wasn’t explained away as being a ‘women’s issue’ and therefore marginal and easy to ignore. It shouldn’t be. This is about equality – which affects you, regardless of gender. Yes, it sucks that the world takes notice when a man does something. No, it shouldn’t be this way. But it is. And maybe, just maybe, if we join hands and do this thing together without drawing gender lines ourselves, in a few years, it won’t be this way anymore.

3. ‘This casts the woman who is invited to speak as an also-ran, putting her immediately as a runner-up to the man stepping down for her.’

Yes, it does. And I think this does mean that Paul may have to change his approach, perhaps so that he and other people (male or female, it’s 50/50 for all) ask the con organisers to disclose the gender balance of the panels they are being invited on, and then, if it’s out of whack, suggest another male (or female) author to readdress the balance. This way, your fans still get to see you on a balanced panel elsewhere at the convention, and there doesn’t have to be any theatre or drawing of attention to an act of substitution.

But, and I want to be really clear about this, just because Paul suggested something that isn’t 100% ideal for women, doesn’t mean we have to throw out the entire idea. The theory is good; we just have to look at the best way of putting it into practice. We don’t need to get into an uproar because the first suggestion wasn’t the best approach – it’s not carved in stone.

My point is: this is a starting point. We’re gonna have to be big girls and suck up some of the stuff we don’t like to help make a change that we desperately want. We have to be pragmatic and proactive, because the status quo wasn’t changing with us doing nothing or shouting about it in forums and on blogs. We shouldn’t be jumping on this suggestion and saying it’s all tosh because it can be seen as patronising – can we please get past that and look at how the entire situation that this is trying to fight against is worse?

Paul’s proposal may not be perfect. But out of it is growing a 50/50 movement that a lot of women and men are getting behind. We’re asking people to talk to cons to check out their gender balance before they say yes. We’re asking women to promote themselves more. We’re asking readers to look at their shelves and see if they read mostly female or male authors, and to try adding a different gender to the shopping cart next time they buy books. I’m hoping that feminists can look at the big picture here and see that we are struggling to bring visible equality to SFF – and that along the way, we’re going to need equal input from all genders to do it.

• Lizzie is the publicity officer for the British Fantasy Society but considers herself ‘rogue’ when it comes to the 50/50 campaign, so content is her own and not the BFS’s. She prefers fantasy books and science fiction TV, and believes that books are a viable form of currency.

1. I made that one up, but it’s a valid question. Why?

If you like scary stories and those who create them, you might be interested to know that February was Women in Horror Recognition Month. This is the second year of the initiative, which was started by Hannah Neurotica out of frustration because of the often-repeated myth that ‘there are no women creating horror’.

While women participate in the horror industry (literature, films, comic books, video games, etc) in fewer numbers than men, they are not absent. Many of them have been working in the field for a very long time, and have considerable credentials. Yet somehow they are rarely remembered and people scratch their heads when trying to recollect their names.

Where women are featured in horror events or magazines there is often an over-emphasis on actresses (Scream Queens and Last Girls) rather than the novelists, screenwriters or directors who are also involved in the field. No doubt this is due to two factors: an over-abundance of male journalists who want to meet their favourite actress, and the usual cultural bias that stresses the value of a woman’s appearance over the strength of her other talents.

No one dismisses the importance of actresses, since women are under-represented in film and television anyway, but women and men deserve more exposure to the variety of work that women accomplish in the field.

Need recommendations?

Here are five of the current crop of female horror writers who are well worth reading.

USA: Sarah Langan

Sarah grew up in Long Island, but went to university in Stephen King territory (Maine), before completing an MFA at Columbia University. After starting to write and publish short stories she graduated quickly onto novels, and in 2006 The Keeper was published to widespread critical acclaim.

Since then she has published two more novels, The Missing (2008) and Audrey’s Door (2009), numerous short stories and one audio drama, Is This Seat Taken (2010).

She’s won three Bram Stoker Awards (two for Best Novel, and one for Best Short Fiction), and a Dark Quill Award.

Canada: Gemma Files

Gemma was born in the UK, but moved to Toronto, Canada when she was a year old. She graduated university with a degree in journalism, and began her career with an eight-year tenure at Eye Weekly in Toronto, where she established her reputation as a genre-friendly film critic.

Five of her short stories were adapted for the US/Canadian horror television series, The Hunger (1997-2000), and she wrote the screenplays for the episodes from the second series “Bottle of Smoke” and “The Diarist”. She also taught screenwriting for eleven years. Her short story “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999. Two collections of her short stories are available: Kissing Carrion (2003) and The Worm in Every Heart (2004).

Gemma’s first novel, A Book Of Tongues (2010), the first book in her Hexslinger series, won the 2010 Black Quill award for “Best Small Press Chill” (both Editors’ and Readers’ Choice) from Dark Scribe Magazine. The sequel, A Rope of Thorns, is due in May 2011.

Australia: Kaaron Warren

Kaaron was born in Australia, and after a sojourn in Fiji has returned to Canberra, Australia. Her horror short fiction has been gaining attention since she was first published in the early 1990s. She’s now had over 70 stories published in a variety of venues, and has two collections in print: The Grinding House (2005) and Dead Sea Fruit (2010).

Her debut novel Slights (2009), was published to much attention due to its disturbing premise and gripping prose style, and she followed it quickly with Walking the Tree (2010) and Mistification (2011).

In 1999 she won the Aurealis Award for best horror short story, and in 2006 she won the Ditmar Award for Best Short Story and Best Novella/Novelette. She also bagged the 2006 ACT Writing and Publishing Award for best fiction. In 2010 she won a Ditmar Award again, this time for Best Novel for Slights.

UK: Sarah Pinborough

Sarah was born in Buckinghamshire, and she spent her early childhood travelling in the Middle East because of her father’s career as a diplomat. After college she worked as a teacher before becoming a full time writer.

She’s published six horror novels with Leisure Books – The Hidden (2004), The Reckoning (2005), Breeding Ground (2006), The Taken (2007), Tower Hill (2008), Feeding Ground (2009) – and a tie-in novel for the Torchwood TV franchise, Torchwood: Into The Silence (2009).

Her futuristic horror crime novel, A Matter of Blood, the first of her Dog-Faced Gods trilogy, was released in March 2010. She is also publishing a Young Adult fantasy trilogy called The Nowhere Chronicles under the name of Sarah Silverwood. The first book in the series, The Double-Edged Sword, was published last year.

Her story The Language of Dying won the 2010 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

USA: Mira Grant

Mira is the pen name of the multi-talented writer/illustrator/composer/singer Seanan McGuire, who is the author of the October Daye and InCryptid series of urban fantasy novels.

Last year her zombie horror novel, Feed, written as Mira Grant, was published to considerable popularity. The sequel, Deadline, is due out in May 2011, and her Newsflesh trilogy will be rounded up with the publication of Blackout next year.

Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and Feed was named as one of Publishers Weekly‘s Best Books of 2010.

It’s difficult to pick five out of such a talented field, so I feel obliged to list a number of other writers people should read: Lisa Morton, Margo Lanagan, Tananarive Due, Caitlin R Kiernan, Sara Gen, Lisa Tuttle, Kathe Koja, Joyce Carol Oates, Nancy Holder, Catherynne M Valente, Holly Black, Yvonne Navarro, Lisa Mannetti, Tanith Lee, Lucy Snyder, Marjorie Liu, M Rickert, Mary SanGiovanni, Pat Cadigan, Melanie Tem and Helen Oyeyemi.

We should also give a hat-tip to a representation of the women editors (some of whom are also writers) in horror, such as Ellen Datlow (Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, Best Horror of the Year 2), Ann VanderMeer (Weird Tales), Heidi Martinuzzi (editor-in-chief of FanGirlTastic.com), Barbara Roden (All Hallows, At Ease with the Dead, co-edited with Christopher Roden), Paula Guran (Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror), Nancy Kilpatrick (Evolve, Outsiders), Monica S Kuelber (Rue Morgue), Christine Makepeace (Paracinema) and Angela Challis (Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror).

This is just a small sample of the talented women who are writing and editing horror. There are far more, with new writers breaking into the field every day. I take it as a good sign that this year’s longlist for the Bram Stoker Awards included a more diverse list of writers and editors.

Of course, there are also many supportive men in the industry who have published women and promoted their inclusion.

Let’s hope in a few years there will be no need for Women in Horror Recognition Month. For the moment, however, it’s a necessary reminder to strive for a better representation of the diversity of voices in the horror business.

• Maura McHugh has been a horror fan since she could read gory fairy tales and sneakily watch creepy movies without parental intervention. Her work in various media have been published in a number of venues such as Black Static, Shroud Magazine, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She co-organised the Campaign for Real Fear horror competition last year. Her first graphic novel, Róisín Dubh, is due this summer from Atomic Diner in Ireland.

This old thing?

She has a dizzying list of titles to her name, of which I managed to snatch only a portion: most people have heard of Ballet Shoes, and, for many, it was a defining childhood book. It’s a critics’ and writers’ pet: (Dame) Jacqueline Wilson cites it as her “all-time favourite children’s book”, and the BBC has twice adapted it for television. Lots of people also know about the other ‘Shoes’ books: Dancing Shoes, White Boots, Tennis Shoes, Ballet Shoes for Anna and the Carnegie award-winning The Circus Is Coming, but maybe less are familiar with The Children of Primrose Lane, Party Shoes, the Gemma books, or Caldicott Place. Certainly, her considerable output of books for adults has largely gone unnoticed (one of which formed the basis for Ballet Shoes itself) and I myself have only read one: Saplings, an experimental novel that explores contemporary thought about child psychology in the aftermath of war. Somewhat disturbingly, it is still written from Streatfeild’s distinctive ‘child’s-eye-view’, from which vantage point it addresses issues as varied as depression, alcoholism, sex, bed-wetting, bereavement and female self-esteem (not all at once, of course).

We Three Fossils... The Fossil Vow, illustrated by Streatfeild's sister, Ruth Gervis

It has been often commented that Streatfeild’s gift is her ability to establish a rapport with her reader: she never talks down to children, and deals with difficult topics in the same way she describes everyday occurrences. Her commitment to realism in writing extends to her habit of painstakingly explaining what all the characters are thinking at all times. Thus, in Dancing Shoes, the just-orphaned Rachel is considered unloving and aggressive because she took her mother’s death with equanimity: we the readers, on the other hand, are kept aware of Rachel’s trials – how she scowls to keep from crying and wants to avoid any questions that might set her off. The child-reader is nevertheless forced to see the situation from at least two perspectives simultaneously, a common approach to Literature since Samuel Richardson, but amazingly innovative in writing for children. The result is a style that demands a responsibility from its readers as well as understanding: it accepts that life is often unfair, but invites children to consider how best to respond.

Streatfeild was famously the ‘unattractive’ middle girl in a clergyman’s family of three daughters. After the ‘beautiful child’ tradition of nineteenth-century children’s literature (best represented by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Lewis Carroll), her novels frequently focus on the rebellious, the stubborn and the plain, than which no better example exists than the ‘black-doggish’ Jane Winter in The Painted Garden, which meta-fictionally reworks Hodgson Burnett’s most famous novel on a film set in Hollywood. In the absence of naive beauty and idyllic country settings, her characters must make their way on merit, and, not only plain, they are often money-minded to a startling degree: “The law lets me work; I don’t need a licence, and I can do what I like with my own money,” asserts Pauline, in Ballet Shoes, at fourteen (and she gets her way).

Dr Jakes and Dr Smith, by Ruth Gervis.

The central conceit of this novel – the absence of Great Uncle Matthew (“Gum”), who adopts the three ‘Fossils’ and then dashes off to “some strange islands” – means that the book features an essentially all-female cast. Aside from the Fossils themselves – Pauline, Petrova and Posy – the house in Cromwell Road also contains Sylvia, the children’s guardian (“Garnie”); Nana, a no-nonsense disciplinarian; Theo Dane, a dancing teacher at the Children’s Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, and Dr Smith and Dr Jakes, doctors of Maths and English respectively. These last two later move on to “a charming flat in Bloomsbury” and although aged seven I never thought to ask why two female doctors should have to live together, now I wonder if Streatfeild has not rather audaciously put a lesbian couple in a 1930s kids’ book (there are some rumours about the nature of the friendships she shared with women herself, and she has been claimed variously for a lesbian and an asexual). Certainly the illustration of the Doctors by Ruth Gervis suggests she saw it that way, even if Streatfeild may not have done: they are depicted in a stereotypical style that has barely changed since the novel was written in 1936.

The only man in sight, apart from the absent Gum, is Mr Simpson, a border who teaches Petrova all about cars and then must go back to his ‘rubber trees’ in Kuala Lumpur. And while Pauline and Posy have looks and interests to endear them to the most pink and fluffy reader going, Petrova remains as stubbornly boyish as that perennially scruffy heroine of female fiction, Little Women‘s Jo: when the dancing school plan is first mentioned, Nana hopes it will “turn her more like a little lady” – Petrova “never plays with dolls, and takes no more interest in her clothes than a scarecrow”.

Alas for Nana, Petrova ends up spending auditions “flying an imaginary airplane on a new route to China”, and by the end of the book, is a determined aviator: “Amy Mollison and Jean Batten will be [in the history books], but not as important at you”, promises Pauline, imagining the distinctly un-fluffy story such books will tell: ‘[She] found routes by which goods could be carried at greater speed and less cost, and so she revolutionized trade.” Hardly the dreams of a ‘beautiful child’.

For Petrova, as for so many of Streatfeild’s children not given to performing art (and there are a surprising number, despite her reputation), the most important lesson of stage school is self-sufficiency, a goal underlined across all the books by the fact that the overwhelming majority of child-characters have no parents to speak of, or are lumbered with a domineering guardian to struggle against (notably in Ballet Shoes For Anna and White Boots). With their realist emphasis, and the lessons that ‘even’ little girls can get on in a world assailed by stupidity, war, and even natural disasters, I can think of no better author to recommend to absolutely everyone you know.