Historically, the English-language comic-book field has been male-dominated. This has led to rampant sexism and the harassment of female fans and creators in the comics industry.
Historical exclusion of women
The 1940s and 1950s in America were a time when comic books rose to prominence in the public eye. There was a rise in the type and number of comics being published. Where before, comics had only found homes on the pages of newspapers, and were used as tools to sell papers and attract new readers, by the 40s and 50s, comics were becoming their own medium, independent from the papers, and being featured in their own magazines and comic books. According to David Hajdu: By 1952, more than twenty publishers were producing nearly 650 comics titles per month, employing well over a thousand artists, writers, editors, letterers, and others—among them women, as well as untold members of racial, ethnic, and social minorities who turned to comics because they thought of themselves or their ideas as unwelcome in more reputable spheres of publishing and entertainment. According to Trina Robbins, many girls and young women were reading comics at that time: In one year—1948–1949—romance comic titles jumped from four to 125, more than one quarter of comic books published were romance comics. This was the same year that a graph in Newsdealer magazine showed that females age seventeen to twenty-five were reading more comic books than guys. It is clear that many girls were engaging with the medium by reading romance comics, but writer Suzanne Scott warns in her 2013 essay Fangirls in refrigerators: The politics of (in)visibility in comic book culture that: ...comics scholarship often essentializes women's taste in comics among gendered genre lines, at the expense of engaging with the (admittedly small but robust) female audience for mainstream comics.
In 1946, the National Cartoonists Society was formed in the United States of America. Women were excluded from the organization. Three years after its formation, the cartoonist Hilda Terry sent the National Cartoonists Society a letter saying: We must humbly request that you either alter your title to the National Men Cartoonists Society ... or discontinue whatever rule or practice you have which bars otherwise qualified women cartoonists. She was accepted into the group the following year, and immediately nominated several other female cartoonists for membership. In 1976, Trina Robbins produced Wet Satin, an anthology of erotic comics for women, by women. The printer used by publisher Kitchen Sink Press refused to publish it, denouncing it as pornographic. The same printer had previously published a sex book by all male creators, which according to Robbins had "such an obscene cover it had to be covered with plain white paper before it could even be distributed to the comic book stores".
As Robbins tells it: The printer insisted that the male sex book, Bizarre Sex, was satire, while Wet Satin was serious and therefore objectionable. Yet the underground sex newspaper Screw, hardly a feminist journal, said in a review, "The humour in Wet Satin is another welcome change from other undergrounds... What might have been a tedious and boring look into the sexual psyche of 'liberated' women turns out to be a series of clever, satirical, and entertaining cartoon strips."
The popular women's comics anthology Wimmen's Comix, which ran for twenty years, ended its run in 1992.
In explaining the reason for its end, editor Caryn Leschen said:
Modern day gender gap
In modern-day American comics, there is still a wide gender gap in the profession. This is evidenced in Tim Haley's ongoing study called 'Gendercrunching' on the website Bleeding Cool. Since 2011, Hanley has looked at the monthly titles published by Marvel Comics and DC Comics, breaking down how many men and women are working on each title. In his August 2014 results, which are typical of the general results, 9.5% of people working on DC's titles were female, and 90.5% were male, as well, 9.8% of the people working on Marvel's titles that month were female and 90.2% were male. Similarly, user deantlogic on LiveJournal broke down the number of men and women included in The Best American Comics Series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Of the nine books in the series, six men acted as guest editors, and three women acted as guest editors, and of the 291 artists included, 222 were men and 69 were women. In 2011, DC Comics relaunched many of its titles, christening this new beginning The New 52.