Okay except here’s the thing…the music industry IS and HAS been a male-dominated industry from which women have constantly been pushed out since the beginning. The existence of a few outliers like Beyonce doesn’t change that fact.

Fantasy publishing has been an old boy’s club for a very long time. The fact that authors like LeGuin, Moon, McKillip, Kerr, Jemisin, and so on EXIST is testament to their tenacity, not a reason to suppose the genre is still anywhere close to gender-equal.

UF is, indeed, its own beast, and I was writing more about epic fantasy. And indie publishing is its own beast again, where, without the influence of a sexist and male-dominated infrastructure, women have been and continue to do fantastically well. I take that as yet another sign that there is no reason traditional fantasy publishing should continue to try to exclude women the way it does—they’re clearly just as good at this as the men, and in many cases better.