Where are the women of the future?

Just before Christmas I and my two fellow Pentangle Press authors booked a table at a craft fair to sell our books.  Every time I do one of these events I despair about the future of women. If I'd been paid a pound for every time a woman has come up to me and said "I don't read science fiction, so I'm not going to buy your book" I'd have so much money I wouldn't need to worry about selling them. But of  course, these people have never read any SF, so they don't know what they're talking about.

Quite frankly, these women piss me off. They're so cosily wrapped up in their happy families, very often not working for a living or earning their own way in the world.  And they have absolutely no idea of the breadth of stories being published in the SF genre these days.

Sometimes I feel like a modern day Suffragette trying to convince these women that SF is for everyone. I made the mistake of trying to engage one of these smug, wealthy, kept women in just that discussion at this craft fair.  And what I found was a totally closed mind, a woman unwilling to engage in any discussion of the issues at all.  She had her cozy little life as she wanted it, and she didn't want that cosiness disturbed.

So where does that leave us, the women who do write SF?  It feels as if I'm swimming against a massive tide of complacency all the time.  But at least I am using my imagination and trying to envisage what the future might be like.  

And yet, I know that these smug women don't represent the whole of the female gender.  One of the joys of attending SF conventions is sitting down to chat with women who read the books I do, talking with them about the challenges that beset our abused and overpopulated planet now.

I know that I am not alone, but sometimes it feels like it.  Even these blog posts are read by more people in the US and Canada than in the UK.

So where are the women of the future in the UK?  Are we simply so tied up in Brexit and short-termism  that we've lost our ability to dream and think about the future?  

If that's so, then the future is dark for us indeed.  We'll be totally unprepared when it arrives.