Guardian Unlimited recently had a nice article on the gender gap in the literary prize world. If you look at One Stories that have won acclaim, you see that both stories included in Best American Short Stories were written by males and only one of five honorable mention stories had a female author.

However, the two One Story authors included in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best 06 were both female.

As far as the breakdown of One Story authors goes, we seem to be weakly sexist ourselves, with 33 female authors and 40 male authors. If one considers our authors to be employees of One Story (and thus adds other employees to the tally) the score becomes exactly tied.

Of course, if the number of females submitting fiction were drastically higher than that of males, we would still be sexist. I think the real lesson here is to be wary of statistics.

Statistics were gathered from our past issues page.