By Autumn Daughetee

Recently, I decided to do some research on women comic book and science fiction fans. After a couple of hours online I was shocked to see how little research had been done on women as consumers of comic books and sci fi. Is the female comic book reader really such a minority that the major companies shouldn’t even bother to find out how many of us are out there? Of course, I disagree. I think there are way more of us than the mainstream industry thinks. Even the Mecca of geekdom, Comic Con, has a healthy female attendance­—40 percent.

Here are a few more facts and stats about us girls that I stumbled onto during my research. While the facts on women who read comic books are slim, the numbers are encouraging. The digital-comics platform ComiXology reported last year that 20 percent of ComiXology users were women. This number has increased from fewer than 5 percent when the platform launched in 2007. ComiXology also knows a bit about its female readers. “She’s 17-26 years old, college-educated, lives in the suburbs, and is new to comics. She prefers Tumblr to Reddit. She may have never even picked up a print comic.”

There are even more encouraging numbers of women who enjoy video games and science fiction. Both of these have long shared a fan base with comic books, so a common sense assumption would be that some of their female fans cross over as well.

Let’s start with women and video games. Did you know that 45 percent of video game players are women? That’s nearly half. Also, in the summer of 2012, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said that Nintendo platforms have “almost the same” number of female and male users. If that’s the case it makes me wonder why so many video games obviously target to men instead of women.

Now let’s take a look at science fiction. The National Science Foundation (NSF) actually did some research on science fiction readership, because it can lead readers to careers in science and because it can influence positive attitudes toward science and technology. For us, this means that there is some actual research available to examine. For example, according to NSF, 31 percent of men and 28 percent of women read science fiction books or magazines. This is nearly equal! Women also make up nearly half (45 percent) of SyFy Channel viewership. Finally, Daryl G. Frazetti, anthropologist and pop culture researcher, surveyed Star Trek fans, finding 57 percent identified as female. Wow!

All of that leads me to believe that a major portion of the comic book readership is being ignored and not given the content they crave. ! I believe the comic book industry can reach equally inclusive numbers with a little effort. I also believe that if you give women the kind of content they crave they’ll step up and buy it. After all, women account for the majority of all consumer purchases.

How should the comic book industry go about producing content that women will find interesting? I think the answer is simple. Hire more female creators. There are many talented women writers and artists out there fighting for the chance to create the stories and graphics that speak to them. We should give them the chance. This is a large reason why Kymera Press was created—to give talented women a place to create comic books that appeal to women and girls. This concept is central to everything that we do.

GeekGirlCon has gathered a lot of the available statistics and research together into one fact sheet at http://geekgirlcon.com/press-kit/. If you’d like to learn more, I suggest you start there.