Women & SF: Some Numbers

Some of the responses to the women and the Hugos debate have suggested that we need to do more to promote SF written by women so that people know to read it. Others have said that few women are eligible, or that women don’t vote. Niall Harrison made the point that only 13% of submissions to this year’s Clarke Award were from women. Elsewhere it has been suggested that only around 39% of Worldcon attendees are female, which might introduce a bias.

We don’t get hard data on actual voters, which is a shame. I have a sneaking suspicion that, because so many women are brought up to be self-effacing and non-competitive, we are more likely to come out with excuses for not voting such as, “I don’t think I know enough to decide” or “I couldn’t bear to choose between them.”

The number of women writers, however, can be checked, sort of. The first thing to note here is that the Clarke is supposedly for “science fiction” only, while the Hugos are definitely (because it says so in the WSFS Constitution) for “science fiction and fantasy”. The Hugos are also open to all books published anywhere in the world, and I’m not going to be able to get a list of those. But I did think I could make a start. As usual, the Feminist SF Wiki has a page for eligible works by women, and people like Tempest keep an eye on the market. However, there are not many novels listed. I thought that there must be more. Also there was no comparison with male writers.

So I figured I could just go to the Locus list of Forthcoming Books and count. I confess to having done this very quickly, and there are all sorts of issues. I was by no means 100% sure which books were novels, which were not reprints, and even which people using their initials were women. Bearing that in mind, this is what I found: over the whole of 2009 Locus listed 243 novels by men, and 74 by women. That’s only 30% of the eligible novels by women.

Is that the whole picture? I suspect not. To start with Locus doesn’t list everything. I did not see any books from Juno in the list, for example. Not did I see Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue, which is a DAW book by someone well known in fandom on both sides of the Atlantic that has been getting a lot of good press. So Locus may have a bias against “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance”, or the publishers of such books may not submit data to Locus.

But the thing that really scared me was this. I looked down my list of novels by women that might reasonably be described as “science fiction” as opposed to “fantasy”. I found 9. Yes, just nine. There were two books I did not count: Justina Robson and Elizabeth Bear have both written what is clearly SF to me but which uses characters from mythology and is therefore likely to be seen as fantasy by many people. I did include a book by Margaret Atwood because it is very clearly SF no matter what the author says.

But the bottom line is that of all the Hugo-eligible novels produced this year (that Locus reports), less than 4% are science fiction by women. And because Locus under-reports classes of fantasy books that are generally written by women that number is probably an over-estimate.

I don’t like the sound of that.

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40 Responses to Women & SF: Some Numbers

  1. Jonathan Strahan says:

    Hey Cheryl –

    I wouldn’t use that version of the Forthcoming Books list as a guide. From what I can tell (I may be wrong) the list on the website is an excerpt of an excerpt. When the quarterly listing is compiled Locus preceeds the main list with a short list of titles of interest. The online list is either that short list reorganised or an excerpt from that list. To attempt a by-gender analysis you really should get the four ‘Forthcoming Books’ listings that appear in a given year and break that down. It would be more meaningful, more accurate and, I suspect, less depressing.

    – Jonathan

  2. Cheryl says:

    Jonathan:

    Is there any reason why we can’t have a better list online?

  3. Jonathan Strahan says:

    You’d have to ask Locus, but they’ve never published the full Forthcoming Books listing. The short ‘highlights’ version is provided to be of interest, and perhaps to encourage people to buy the relevant Forthcoming Books issue (though the latter is just my supposition – I’ve not been told).

    If you, or someone else, is seriously interested in researching this I’d suggest a more fruitful approach would be asking Bill Contento for a data dump that featured only original books by year for a period. I’d be surprised if he didn’t oblige (he’s very helpfu – esp. for research purposes).

    I’d add, based on my own experience as someone who proofreads/fact checks the Forthcoming Lists, the gender breakdown you’ve estimated doesn’t quite jibe. I’m not going to be pollyanna-ish about this, but I think the statistics aren’t quite as grim as you suggest.

  4. Jonathan Strahan says:

    Postscript: That’s online, of course. The full list appears in the magazine. They’ve never published the full list online.

  5. Alisa Krasnostein says:

    What would then be interesting, Cheryl, is comparing the full Locus list and its gender breakdown to the one that is listed online, and is presumably more accessible to a wider audience.

  6. Lee says:

    My question of course is, why?

  7. Djibril says:

    Exactly. If, as Jonathan suspects, the full list has a less “grim” gender breakdown than the published “excerpt of an excerpt”, then what prejudice is informing the selection of these excerpted lists?

  8. Jonathan Strahan says:

    I’ve not done an actual comparison. All I’m highlighting is that the list on the website is an excerpt, and that the full list would have more complete data.

  9. Susan Loyal says:

    I’m assuming that one of the reasons the full list isn’t published online is that it’s quite long. In the print version the “Selected Books by Author” (US) runs about 2 1/2 pages, while the “Complete Books by Publisher” (US) runs about 8 pages. The current list, which I read through just last night, supposedly goes through June of 2010, but not all publishers choose to project out that far, so it varies a bit. (There are also separate UK lists, which have quite a lot of overlap with the US lists.) Rosemary and Rue is in the complete list, btw.

    I wasn’t reading for any specific data, but my general impression was that women are better represented on the complete list, because it includes urban fantasy and ya, which is sparsely represented on the “Selected Books by Author” list. I don’t get the sense that there’s much more sf by women though. If you reflect on the last decade or so, a number of women who once wrote sf are either primarily writing fantasy (Sarah Zettel, Lois McMaster Bujold, and for 2010 Elizabeth Moon) or have been publishing sparsely (Kristine Smith, Amy Thompson, Catherine Wells) or not at all (has Linda Ngata given up fiction?) Kate Wilhelm crossed over to mystery some years ago, after producing some of the best sf/mystery hybrids every written. Too few data points to call it a trend, maybe.

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  11. Cheryl says:

    Comment by Louise Marley copied with permission from Facebook:

    I can shed a little light on this issue, Cheryl. The social science fiction which is my favorite genre, both to write and to read, isn’t selling at all these days. I think of the genre as being uniquely feminine — think Connie Willis or Pat Murphy — but the audience has all but disappeared. For a working writer, this has to be a consideration. It’s regrettable, and it does cut down the percentage of science fiction by women.

  12. Susan Loyal says:

    from 10 “the audience has disappeared” I don’t FEEL invisible, and I try diligently to buy as many novels in the month of their release, when the numbers matter, as my budget will encompass. But as with all those first-time Hugo voters who wonder why their single vote “doesn’t matter” to the outcome, perhaps there aren’t enough of me. Cloning, anyone?

    (Sincere apologies to Louise Marley, whose science fiction I enjoy, whose name should have featured among the parenthetical listings above–which are examples only and in no way complete or thorough. Also apologies to Amy Thomson, whose name contains no “p”. Shouldn’t type without coffee!)

  13. Susan Loyal says:

    If any publisher feels like answering, did the sales of social science fiction (which I’m assuming includes works where the science is sociology, anthropology, etc.) actually decline, or did they not increase sufficiently to remain competitive with other subgenres?

  14. Jeff Beeler says:

    Are you including authors like Laurell Hamilton, Kelley Armstrong and J.D. Robb who write in SF/Horror settings but not for traditional SF publishers?

    New author C.L. Anderson is female and just wrote an SF mystery in paperback.

    Don’t forget this lot:

    http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/Author-List-Page

    Definitely the SF field has changed from the sixties and early seventies when I started in reading authors like Andre Norton, Anne McCaffery and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  15. Cheryl says:

    Jeff:

    I think most people would class Laurell Hamilton and Kelley Armstrong as fantasy, not as science fiction. Ditto McCaffrey and Bradley. I know we often use “science fiction” as an umbrella term, but that’s not how I’m using it here because one of the rationales advanced for the lack of women in the Hugos is that women don’t write “science fiction”, they write “fantasy”.

    (And yes, I know both are eligible, but there’s a perception that Hugo voters may prefer traditional SF.)

  16. Yonmei says:

    At the Broad Universe panel on Sunday, it was said by one of the Broads present that Locus both tends to send out for review fewer books by women than by men (of those they’re sent) and of those that are reviewed, publishes reviews of fewer books by women than by men.

  17. SMD says:

    Other factors that have to be considered, that we don’t know and probably can’t know:
    –# of books submitted to traditional print publishers by men and women vs. the # selected.
    –# of women writing SF/F vs. # of men.

    The problem with talking about all this is that we base it only on what we know, which is always too incredibly simplistic for something as pervasive and contentious and sexism (or racism, for that matter).

  18. Gary Farber says:

    I wanted to remind myself who does the “submitting” of works for the Clarke Award, and found a bit of a problem here.

    Oh, wait, this works, though.

    It’s the publisher who submits, right?

    Okay, yes.

    […] We encourage publishers to submit books from across the range of science fiction genre publishing. These must be unified and substantial works; books of short stories and novellas are not eligible.

    It’s up to the book’s publisher to enter a novel for the prize, and to do so by the deadline date set for that year. In addition, the judges are free to call in novels which they consider eligible for consideration.

    And since the award is for “the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year,” any figures about the Clarke Award would seem to be relevant only when speaking about British publishers; American publishers can’t submit for works published only in North America.

    I mention this only because I wanted to clarify my own understanding, and figured I might as well mention the point.

    “Elsewhere it has been suggested that only around 39% of Worldcon attendees are female, which might introduce a bias.”

    The methodology there was counting up the names beginning with “A” of a single Worldcon, which is to say, a sample of 89 names, and I’m not clear what the timing was as to when that sample of names dated from, as related to the Hugo voting deadline. Not exactly definitive info.

    Not that I’m suggesting that 39% isn’t plausible as a pointer to overall contemporary Worldcon attendence (which isn’t a point I’m qualified to speak to).

    But it’s particularly inconclusive about Hugo voting/nominating given that, as you allude, only a small percentage of members of the Worldcon vote, and we don’t even have any figures at all on the demographics of actual voters.

    I’m agreeing that more rigorous research would be helpful, as you say in “We don’t get hard data on actual voters, which is a shame.”

    Re Locus: “Is there any reason why we can’t have a better list online?”

    Well, Mark R. Kelly’s Locus Online is done by him, separate from the magazine. I think it’s obvious, without knowing any details, that the magazine (formerly Charlie, of course) doesn’t want to undercut sales of the magazine by allowing too much substance on the separate website, which is run separately by Mark. (My impression is that he runs it largely, if not entirely, single-handedly.)

    But there’s also something of a leap from the idea of attempting to compile a list of Hugo-eligible sf from Locus to considering what Hugo voters are apt to consider, as well.

    The question of compiling a list of “Hugo-eligible novels” seems a bit problematic, given that it’s ultimately tautological with what the pool of Worldcon members sees and considers, and given that the members of the Worldcon can nominate anything they want, with no fiction ever being ruled ineligible-by-content, and thus we end up in an infinite loop.

    “or have been publishing sparsely (Kristine Smith, Amy Thompson, Catherine Wells) or not at all (has Linda Ngata given up fiction?”

    That’s Amy Thomson and Linda Nagata, fwiw. I certainly hope Nagata hasn’t given up fiction; I was very impressed by the stuff of her’s I’ve read, specifically, the manuscript of Vast, which I wrote a very favorable report on for Ellen Asher, recommending she buy it for the SFBC, but which I see apparently didn’t happen, for some reason (possibly Bantam Spectra asked for more than SFBC was willing to pay).

    Nagata’s website says:

    […] Most of my work was done in the mid to late nineties, when I had the privilege of being a stay-at-home mom. Since 2000 I have been working full-time as a programmer of online database applications, a circumstance that has greatly reduced the quantity of fiction I’ve produced in the new millennium… but pay no attention to the non-believers! I am still writing!

    If you want details, I suggest either emailing her or asking on her blog.

  19. Cheryl says:

    SMD: So what, you would prefer that we never talk about such issues at all? That it should be taboo to mention that sexism and racism actually exist?

  20. Gary Farber says:

    “At the Broad Universe panel on Sunday, it was said by one of the Broads present that Locus both tends to send out for review fewer books by women than by men (of those they’re sent) and of those that are reviewed, publishes reviews of fewer books by women than by men.”

    I expect Jonathan Strahan, who last I looked was reviews editor of Locus, could speak to that. Former executive editor Liza Groen Trombi is now the editor-in-chief, as I understand it, so questions and complaints might well be made directly to them.

    You can write the latter at locus at locusmag dot com or use this contact info.

    It might be helpful if you were able to identify specifically whom you’re quoting from the Broad Universe panel.

  21. Gary Farber says:

    “The social science fiction which is my favorite genre, both to write and to read, isn’t selling at all these days. I think of the genre as being uniquely feminine — think Connie Willis or Pat Murphy — but the audience has all but disappeared.”

    FWIW, Isaac Asimov coined the term “social science fiction” in 1953 in an essay in “>Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future, the first edition, from Advent:Publisher. H. G. Wells was writing it by most any definition.

    I’d be curious to see what definition or attempt at border-drawing makes “social science fiction” “uniquely feminine.”

  22. Gary Farber says:

    Sorry, “Advent:Publishers,” not “Advent:Publisher”: they did so many of the crucial early nonfiction books on science fiction. Earl Kemp remains very active as a fanzine publisher, with his most recent issue coming out about two weeks ago.

  23. Susan Loyal says:

    Cheryl,

    I did some quick and rough counting using the US lists in the September edition of Locus. In the “Selected Works by Author” list I counted a total of 235 titles, 82 by women (just a hair over a third). In the “Complete Works by Publisher” list I counted (!) roughly 2019 titles (which includes reprints), 702 of them by women (again, just a hair over a third). I am sure that I made some misattributions during the process, so these numbers are very approximate.

    Using the “Selected Works by Author” list, I attempted to determine how many titles were SF rather than F. This involves some guess work, since not all titles are immediately self-evident, and some authors are well-known for both SF and F. Best I could determine was a count of (at most) 18 SF titles out of the 82 by women (about 1/5), and 56 SF titles out of the 153 by men (just over 1/3). If I attempt this process on the “Complete Works by Publisher” list, I will need new glasses, so that’s all for today.

    29 titles were reviewed in this issue of Locus, 16 of which were by women. However, 9 of those were short reviews by Carolyn Cushman, who regularly covers urban fantasy and ya titles.

    After counting the “Complete Works” list, I’d like to thank personally all those who bother to create the “Selected Works” list, whatever their selection criteria may be.

  24. Doug Knipe says:

    Cheryl you said – “(And yes, I know both are eligible, but there’s a perception that Hugo voters may prefer traditional SF.)” I think the keyword here is perception. Open the doors to urban fantasy which if you pardon me is in itself a misnomer because one could make the argument that the preternatural creatures featured in many of the stories are little different than the same stories told where the creatures are aliens. The majority of “urban fantasy” is written by women and it would more than tip the scales and the balance. If Harry Potter can win a Hugo, there is definitely room at the table for UF and paranormal.

  25. Liviu says:

    Just a quick note that CL Anderson is a pseudonym – real name is on the inside cover in the copyright area – for a sff author who wrote two very good sf novels (kind of space opera) in the mid 90’s and then went and wrote fantasy.

    I liked her original 2 sf novels much better than Bitter Angels which I found promising and reasonably well written as prose but wasting a great premise in shoddy world building and scattered plot…

    Some more names that have not been mentioned but I quite like their work:

    Marianne De Pierres – Sentients of Orion – 2/4 out – I reviewed #2 and volume 3 due this fall is a big asap for me

    Jaine Fenn – 2/3 out both reviewed by me and liked a lot

    Laura Reeve – 1/3 (?) out and I reviewed it , 2 is due October and another asap – her series is adventure sf though is marketed as mil-sf

  26. Gary Farber says:

    “Open the doors to urban fantasy which if you pardon me is in itself a misnomer because one could make the argument that the preternatural creatures featured in many of the stories are little different than the same stories told where the creatures are aliens.”

    “Urban fantasy” was pretty much started by Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks in 1987.

    Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was Hugo nominated in 2000, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won Best Novel in 2001.

    What, specifically, do you suggest should be done to “open the doors” of the Hugo Award to urban fantasy? Can you concretize your metaphor with a specific, perhaps?

  27. Gary Farber says:

    “…because one could make the argument that the preternatural creatures featured in many of the stories are little different than the same stories told where the creatures are aliens.”

    That, incidentally, would be an incredibly weak argument. Hal Clement and Vernor Vinge’s aliens, just to pluck out two random examples, are more than a “little different” from “preternatural creatures.” Hard sf is, in fact, distinguishable from fantasy.

    I don’t care for arguments about genre borders, but you’re talking about subgenres that are far off on the spectrum from each other.

    There’s no shortage whatever of fantasy winning and being nominated for Hugos, though, since 1958 through today.

    This year’s Best Novel winner was The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman; last year’s winner was The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
    by Michael Chabon; 2005’s winner was Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

    And so on.

  28. Gary Farber says:

    To be sure, I may have misunderstood what you meant, Doug Knipe, by “the same stories told where the creatures are aliens.”

  29. Doug Knipe says:

    Gary in many ways it is a matter of degree regarding the creatures. You quote the hard SF in-depth world-building of Clement and Vinge yet those stand side by-side with military SF where authors create an enemy, call it an alien and of you go with little or no detailed world-building.

    Many UF series have built their rationale for existence of their creatures around SF concepts including everything from nano-technology to ancient marooned alien visitors. But this is getting off point. You asked me to make some suggestions although really you have already supported the view that fantasy is often favoured by the voters especially in recent years.

    Maybe it does begin with Locus which pretty much sets the tone for acceptability. It is called The Magazine of the Science Fiction AND Fantasy Field after all. Maybe it needs to be more inclusive regarding UF. The UF included in its’ lists is pretty hit and miss, even arbitrary.

    Tim Holman’s recent assessment of UF in the SFF marketplace shows UF with a substantial slice of the readership pie. Despite its primary SF roots maybe the Hugo should embrace this changing trend.

  30. Gary Farber says:

    “You quote the hard SF in-depth world-building of Clement and Vinge yet those stand side by-side with military SF where authors create an enemy, call it an alien and of you go with little or no detailed world-building.”

    Yes, there are many subgenres (and loose, porous, boundaries, thank goodness) of sf and fantasy. I’m not clear what link you’re making between “hard sf” and “military sf.”

    Some sf is rigorous about creating genuinely alien aliens — not necessarily with any sort of hard sf methodology, I hasten to add — and some is not.

    “Maybe it does begin with Locus which pretty much sets the tone for acceptability.”

    For whom? I’m — please forgive me — again not following what you’re saying here.

    “Maybe it needs to be more inclusive regarding UF.”

    I’m not sure what role “needs” is playing in this sentence: whose needs?

    And Locus is a privately owned, for-profit, enterprise. It’s done by people who have a love for the fields of science fiction and fantasy, but I, for one, would hesitate to tell anyone else what they “need” to do with their personal publication; the people at Locus don’t have a duty to anything or anyone beyone what they themselves desire to do. They’re not PBS.

    “Despite its primary SF roots maybe the Hugo should embrace this changing trend.”

    “The Hugo” is a statute; it has no agency; only the individual voters, acting in the end as a collective, do. Most fans who care about the Hugo feel free to make their choices known to anyone who cares, and to explain why they think their choices are good choices.

    But “the Hugo” isn’t going to be doing anything at all, what with being a statute (designed by Ben Jason and Jack McKnight). I gather you’re using “the Hugo” as a sort of polyseme or metonym, but what exactly you are referring to the award as standing in for is unclear to me.

    Anybody and everybody is free to publicize lists of whom they wish to advocate should win, or be nominated for, Hugos.

  31. Doug Knipe says:

    OK Gary I give in. Obviously I am not making a cogent argument or following some acceptable set of debating rules or terms of reference as you deconstruct everything I say sentence by sentence. LOL I guess I will slink off back to my lowly subgenre and pout.

  32. Cheryl says:

    Doug:

    Apologies for what might come over as more nitpickery, but what do you mean by “open the doors”? The doors are already open, always have been. It is just that those books (for whatever reason) are not coming through them.

  33. Cheryl says:

    Susan:

    Many thanks for risking your eyesight in the cause of better research. My excuse is that all of my copies of Locus are in California where I am not.

  34. Paula Guran says:

    Since I just got around to reading this, I’d like to go back to the beginning.

    1) As Jonathan pointed out, Mark’s list is not complete. The print version of the Locus Forthcoming Books list takes, as I understand it, an incredible amount of time and effort to generate and Locus has kept that expensively compiled content exclusively for its print magazine which must be purchased. That way the person(s) who compile it get paid. Understandable.

    2) That print list is the most complete compilation of genre books published that I am aware of. It includes fantasy and horror. Despite my point six, below, this remains true.

    3) Mark’s Locus Online is self-admittedly, “selected” from the larger print list. Not a good starting point for a discussion that is trying to count overall books/authors for any comparison. (Independent press, for example, is over-represented.)

    4) As for Pocket Juno: Locus has always solicited the info and listed our books both as small press and now as part of Pocket.

    Locus Online listed our books as forthcoming when we first started. Don’t think it does now.

    5) What is or is not fantasy is an entirely different subject. If you want some rough ideas about the terms “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” see: http://juno-books.com/blog/?p=410 . And, yes, if anyone is asking, Pocket Juno publishes FANTASY, not romance.

    6) What Locus under-reviews, under-reports, misinforms its readership concerning, and is behind the times on is *currently* unfair to debate. Yes, the last few years I *personally* feel it became increasingly irrelevant to sf/f. My choice, because I felt that way, was to quit buying and reading it. Now, with Charles gone, perhaps it still has a chance to become, once again, “_the_ magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field.” Or maybe my personal views are wrong. :-)

  35. Susan Loyal says:

    Cheryl,

    You’re welcome. I’d assumed that even if you were getting Locus in Darkest Somerset, the Sept issue wouldn’t have arrived there yet, as mine just hit my mailbox two days ago. And I’m by no means sure that my “counting” resulted in better data.

    Since the women/total ratio of the Selected and Complete lists both are about 1/3, however, I do think that it suggests the stats you offered based on Mark’s by-month and by-author list are likely to be representative of the current publishing situation. (It also suggests that whatever the selection criteria are for the Selected List, and whatever specific titles may slip through that sieve, the process is not warping the general data.)

    Without trying to quantify in any rigorous way, it seems clear that women who write SF & F write SF less frequently than men do. I don’t know if a rigorous approach would bring the final percent of the total field that is “SF by women authors” to the 4% you derived or the 7% that I got, but it truly is very small. Much smaller than I had realized, dispite my “where are the snows of yesteryear” opining at 9 above.

    I hope that you find a data source that would allow easier analysis.

    I’m wondering a little if the overall percent of fantasy hasn’t increased a little this year as a result of the economic downturn, since fantasy has the reputation of selling better.

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  37. The forthcoming books list on the website (http://www.locusmag.com/Resources/ForthcomingBooks.html) isn’t an excerpt of an excerpt; it’s the two “Selected Books by Author” published in the magazine and chosen by its editors — e.g. on pages 50 and 60 of the September issue. Locus HQ sends those lists to me in a .doc file. I do some clever search/replaces and table conversions to turn it into a delimited text file, which I import into the database that supports the website…

    Possibly a better list for this analysis would be the Directory page, e.g. 2009 Directory: Novels, which includes the forthcoming titles, as well as all books reviewed in Locus, included in any bestseller list, and/or listed by me on the website’s ‘new books’ page. Not completely exhaustive of everything that’s published, but moreso than the forthcoming lists themselves. (Note the Directory pages are split, one for novels, plus two others.)

    (I’m home today on an unpaid furlough day, and have time to read other people’s blogs…)

  38. Follow-up note: the forthcoming lists from the September issue are not yet on the site. They will be sometime in the next few days…

  39. Gary Farber says:

    “or have been publishing sparsely (Kristine Smith, Amy Thompson, Catherine Wells)”

    What has Amy Thompson published, btw?

    I keep seeing an “Amy Thompson” credited with Amy Thomson’s books — Amy Thomson has always had a problem with people getting her name wrong — but I also note that 25 of my Facebook sf friends are friends with someone named “Amy Thompson,” so I’m curious who this “Amy Thompson” person is in the world of sf, since obviously people wouldn’t be friending a typo.

    I assume this is a case of two people with similar, but not the same, names?

  40. Gary Farber says:

    I ask because I’ve been googling trying to find an sf “Amy Thompson” and all I find are examples of people calling Amy Thomson “Amy Thompson.” But that doesn’t explain Facebook.

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