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Which makes it damn useless for the reader, because the good stuff gets buried in mountains of crap.
This is a view that assumes there's some fixed demographic ratio of "readers", and therefore SF publishers should cater to women because women are the majority of readers. I don't believe this is the case. Instead, many publishers have catered to women for essentially ideological reasons, and in doing so have caused men to stop reading their output, resulting in that lopsided ratio of women to men.
I just think it's unlikely that a large market with low barriers to entry maintains a large inefficiency like that. If you look at Fanfiction where there's no barrier to entry and no gatekeepers the vast majority of writers and readers appear to be women. That can't be explained by ideological capture of Fanfiction.net or something.
It seems plausible to me that there are gendered differences in entertainment preferences. Are men overrepresented in video games because of ideological capture of gaming studios or because of male preference for competition. Perhaps women are over presented in fiction reading because the competitive edge of the novel over other storytelling media is long form character study which appeals more to women?
There are not low barriers to entry to publishing. There's low barriers to entry to putting stuff up for Kindle that no one will or should read, but these are not the same thing.
We know it isn't ideological capture of gaming studios because ideological capture of gaming studios goes the other way. On the other hand, with (fiction) reading, reading became more and more female as publishers became more and more captured. And publishers which resisted capture kept their male audience.
If there are uncaptured publishers, and massive demand for male oriented fiction that is not being served, why haven't these uncaptured publishers gobbled up market share? Who do you think is an uncaptured publisher?
If there are a bunch of genius male authors being suppressed why don't they put their stuff on Kindle or Fanfiction.net and go viral? A fair number of female authors have turned viral fanfic into successful novels.
And you still haven't explained the gender disparity in fanfic where no barriers to entry exist.
You're assuming the causation is that publisher's are captured so audience's become female but if our only evidence is timing the causation could run the other way. As audiences become more female publisher's cater to female preferences, and women are disproportionately woke. This explanation fits better with the efficient market hypothesis and so I think has Occam on its side.
There is only one I know of (Baen)... and they are limited by how much they can publish, about 5 books a month. And it is becoming captured. Capture is not a market force.
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