Convention guests: September 2011

I have been gathering information on conventions and industry events for gamingangels.com for the past couple of months, so I decided to use that research I was already doing to look at some statistics on the gender split for convention guests of honor, or celebrity guests for those conventions that don’t call out specific guests to honor. At this point, I am not attempting to make an exhaustive list of all conventions being held. I tried to choose cons that looked interesting and that covered a wide variety of what is available for geeky fans and industry people in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, horror, gaming. I have not included a lot of statistics about the industry events here, because they are less likely to have guests of honor, and it is more a matter of counting all program participants, which is more than I want to do at this point.

Given these limitations, this is more for general interest, and it is not guaranteed to be representative of all conventions out there. I am starting to build a calendar of conventions to track; if you would like to see anything added to the list, please email me at quinn@gamingangels.com with details.

Rules I used:

Where guests of honor are called out, only they are counted for that convention
When the con has a long list of convention guests listed, but no guests of honor, all listed guests are counted
Members of groups are individually counted (so a band with 4 people would have 4 hashes in the count)
In general, I tried to research the composition of all groups by either counting in a group picture, if one was on the con site, or going to official websites or wikipedia; if I couldn’t find information, I noted those groups separately

Note:

Dragon*Con
Doesn’t seem to have official guests of honor, but does have a huge list of attending professionals and performers.

Authors: 10 women, 14 men

Film & Television: 32 women, 69 men

Comics, Art & Illustration: 2 women, 31 men

Music, Theatrics & Performance Art: 22 women, 54 men

There were also 2 ensemble groups for which I couldn’t find member information: Atlanta Radio Theater Company and Lips Down on Dixie.

GlitchCon

Official guests: 17 women, 26 men

Scare-a-Cuse

Celebrities: 9 women, 11 men

Conjecture

1 Guest of Honor--male

The Great New England Steampunk Exhibition

Guests: 21 women, 24 men

FenCon VIII/Deep South Con

Guest of Honor: Gail Carriger
Music Guest of Honor: Joe Bethancourt
Fen Guest of Honor: Steven H Silver
Artist Guest of Honor: Vincent Di Fate*
Science Guest of Honor: Les Johnson
Toastmaster: Bradley Denton
Special Guest: Lou Anders
Special Guest: Stephan Martiniere

Total: 1 woman, 7 men