What kinds of roles do women play, in nerd culture in 2017? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

What kinds of roles do women play, in nerd culture in 2017? I think the question is actually what roles don't women play in nerd culture?

Plenty of women are the progenitors of nerd content, going all the way back to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. Some of the most beloved and memorable fantasy and science-fictional worlds out there have been created by women. J.K Rowling's Harry Potter, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, Veronica Roth's Divergent series, to name just a few of the recent ones. After being bestselling books, all have been giving the big-budget Hollywood treatment.

Women are also some of the iconic role models in our genre(s), both as characters like Wonder Woman, Lt. Uhura, and Princess Leia, and sometimes the actors who play them, like Nichelle Nichols and Carrie Fisher. The stars in our sky are not all blond guys named Chris.

On the local level, when it come to cons and congoing fandom, women are very often the community-builders and leaders who keep these not-for-profit, community-based cons running year after year. I'd also like to mention school librarians and juvenile librarians, who are more likely to be women, often the first people to hand the books of Asimov, or Heinlein, or Holly Black, or J.K Rowling to budding nerds.

And of course huge numbers of women are members of nerd culture, are the readers and consumers of the media, whether that's books, movies, comics, or games, and participants in it by being attendees of cons, cosplayers, fanfic writers and fan artists, and more. I attend many conventions every year where the majority of the attendees are female. including Harry Potter conventions like Leviosa and MISTI-Con, multifandom cons like Arisia and Frolicon, and big commercial cons like The BookCon.

Of course, some very male-dominated areas in media exist. Many of those are a function of privilege in our society at large. Men are more likely to be tech millionaires not because women lack talent or drive but, as studies show, because venture capitalists and investors are unwittingly biased toward male inventors. The wage gap and the glass ceiling are well documented. People put their energies where they get the best encouragement and positive feedback. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the fandom and nerd culture arenas where women don't just participate but dominate tend to be non-commercial: fan fiction, fan art, cosplay, book blogging and book-tubing. But there are also women making video games, creating comics, hitting the bestseller lists, and winning Hugo and Nebula Awards. There's no space or role that I see in nerd culture that is exclusively a male domain.

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