Cautiously, on gender again
Musings after looking at the debate about Eclipse 2.

A completely hypothetical conversation:

Reader: "There are too few female names in this anthology!"
Old-Fashioned Male Editor: "I don't discriminate. If I see a good story in the slush I buy it, regardless of gender."
Reader: "It was a by-invitation anthology. Why didn't you invite...?"
OFME: "I already said that gender is irrelevant. I choose by quality."
Reader: "But "quality" is subjective.  Would a female editor make the same choices?"
Cool as a Cucumber Male Editor: "Editor's gender is not the right way to think about this problem. I am male, and my TOCs are always well-balanced."
Reader: shuts up out of respect for CaaCME and goes away sobbing.

Here are some random facts from three "mixed genre" anthologies.

The TOC of the Firebirds anthology, edited by Sharyn November, contains 13 female authors and 4 male authors.
Firebirds Rising has 14 female, 2 male names.

Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, has a more equal distribution with a preference for the feminine:  12 female authors and 7 male (unless I am mistaken).

The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow, has a  50/50 TOC 10 male and 7 female authors.

We can start arguing about genre. If you look at the Del Rey Book of SF&F, for example, you'll see that most of the undeniably SF stories are by male authors the SF stories have a 50/50 gender breakdown (see below for ellen_datlow's comment). Firebirds is YA with a preference for Fantasy, and who knows what this interstitial stuff really is, huh. But let's not go into the argument of "Fantasy equals female, SF equals male." It's not true. It's just that SF anthology editors are usually male. I wasn't able to find a SF anthology edited by a woman, though I don't know much, so please enlighten me (let's not count Warrior Wisewoman at the moment because of its obvious gender emphasis). Is there a pro SF anthology edited by a woman? Inquiring minds want to know.

No valid argument can be made using this data, because there isn't enough data. Even if there are all-SF pro anthologies edited by women, I doubt there are enough of them for a valid statistical sample (I would like to compare, say, between 5-10 SF anthologies edited by different female editors to an equal amount of anthologies edited by male editors).

What this very small sample suggests, though, is that a female editor of an anthology is unlikely to have a male-dominated TOC.

What do you think?