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Gender Parity

One of the positives aspects of digital culture has been a decrease of 'gatekeeping' in many fandoms and communities. Comics can be read quickly and cheaply from nearly anywhere.  Discussion spaces have opened up beyond physical comic shops.  Gender and race, which were sometimes barriers to conversation, are often not immediately visible in the online world.

Traditionally, the comic book market was understood to be largely white and largely male.  The exact demographic breakdown of past comic book readers doesn't seem to be available.  Like most mass media, including Hollywood movies and television, white, male viewers/readers were well represented and catered to, while many other demographic segments were less represented.

The internet has made many underserved communities more visible. It has made it easier for them to form communities and discuss the issues facing their communities. Female comic fans are one of the communities that have become more visible in the community at large in the age of the internet.

Women are building their own online spaces to discuss comics and related cultures.  Websites like The Mary Sue, which aims to, "promote, watchdog, extoll, and celebrate diversity and women’s representation" in all areas of geek culture including comics are bringing new voices and perspectives to the world of comic book fandom.

It seems that women comic book fans are not only more visible, but also growing in size. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that at the largest annual gathering of comic book fans in America, San Diego Coimcon, there were just as many female attendees as male.  If you just look at people under 40, women actually outnumbered men 51% to 46%.

Women liking comics in large numbers is not new.  Newsdeal published a graph in the 1950's that showed women aged 17 -25 read more comics than their peers, according to Emily Simmons. However, the two biggest comic publishers, DC and Marvel, have catered heavily to a male market for many years. In an interview with the Washington Post, Heidi MacDonald credits the rise of manga for helping the demassification of comics and offering women more choices, saying "The manga boom of the Aughts is absolutely ground zero for where this return to comics being for everyone took place....for the first time since the ’60s, women had their own thing in comics to be fans of, and the girls who read manga back then have grown up, had kids of their own, and they are totally open to comics.”  Webcomics have continued the demassification process, offering creators new ways to monetize their properties and giving readers a greater variety of options, most of which are also free.  The six D's have all likely had an affect on the types of comics available and those who enjoy reading them.  The audience for comics is larger, more diverse, and more visible thanks to the rise of digital culture and the six D's (which I will discuss more in-depth in another blog).  Although not everyone is happy about change, and some long-time fans have viewed this change with anxiety.
If you're interested, I've put together a few resources that focus on women in Geek Spaces:


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