There's an episode of Ghost Hunters, the reality show on the Sci Fi Channel that follows Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson -- Roto-Rooter plumbers by day, ghost busters by night! -- where the duo ends up in a Florida lighthouse in pitch darkness, alone.

Or are they?

"What the frig was that?" Hawes says, pointing his flashlight toward a noise. "It sounded like a lady."

The ghost hunters never found the woman, but the Sci Fi Channel itself has been finding more of them than ever. Once considered a network exclusively for sweatpants-clad men residing in their parents' basements, it has in recent years been attracting increasing numbers of female viewers. Ghost Hunters, which is entering its fourth season in March, actually draws more women than men-once unheard of for the Sci Fi Channel specifically or science-fiction programming in general. Other shows on the network, like Eureka, are also skewing female.

The network's increasing appeal to women is no accident, but rather orchestrated by its president, Bonnie Hammer, who focuses less on interplanetary warfare than she does on so-called "Earth-based" dramas.

These are shows with complex characters, romance and elements of the supernatural -- all of which resonate with women in focus groups.

Other networks are broadcasting sci-fi themed shows embracing women as well. The audience for Medium, the NBC drama that earned Patricia Arquette an Emmy for her portrayal of a clairvoyant who solves crimes, was just over two-thirds female in 2007, according to Nielsen data. Also on NBC, Journeyman and Heroes skew female, as do Ghost Whisperer and Moonlight on CBS, and Lost and Pushing Daisies on ABC.

The reason science fiction is attracting women is not as mysterious as that sound Hawes and Wilson heard in the lighthouse, but neither is it simple.

Science is involved-in the form of polls and focus groups-but marketing magic is, too.

A Woman's Place

When Hammer, who also serves as president of the USA Network (where she's been since 1989) was named president of Sci Fi in 1998, observers scratched their heads. "People said, 'Why is a woman running the Sci Fi Channel?"' Hammer says today. "They thought I was a stranger in a strange land." Her goal was not "to turn it into a women's channel, but to absolutely have women believe it was a place for them as well."

Like any new administration, the first thing Hammer did was change the drapes.

"The whole feel of the channel was more male and visually darker," she says.

"Its graphics and promos were a little more monster driven. What we've done is make it more human, warmer, friendlier."

This approach is evident at every turn for Tin Man, the three-part miniseries that aired in December. Based on The Wizard of Oz, which tends to skew heavily female whenever it's rebroadcast, the non-musical series is action-packed and heavy on special effects -- a selling point for Hammer, who wanted male eyeballs, too.

To draw both women and men to the program, the network developed two types of promo spots. One targeted at women stressed the series' human drama. It ran, among other places, during the Wizard of Oz when it aired on TNT and TBS several times in the fall. The male-targeted spot is more action-oriented and ran during football games (Green Bay vs. Detroit and Cowboys vs. Jets) on CBS and Fox.

The result: While previous miniseries on the network have skewed male, Tin Man was evenly split.

The network, of course, would like new advertisers along with its changing demos. But while Kay Jewelers is now on board, Dave Howe, president of the network, says, "We're not focused on getting cosmetics advertisers -- we're looking for advertising targeting both men and women."

If the gender-balance plan is really just a growth strategy, it's paying off. In 2007, Sci Fi attracted 13 percent more women and 2 percent more men.

Overall, women now represent 43 percent of its audience, up from 41 percent in 2006.

Fantasy Land

These days, the Sci Fi Channel, paradoxically, uses the term "science fiction" sparingly, favoring the term "fantasy" instead.

"'Science fiction' to most people conjures up a narrow definition of space, but the term 'fantasy' is much more appealing, especially to women," says Howe.

Science fiction and fantasy often are intertwined -- bookstores tend to shelve the titles in the same section, for example -- but devotees distinguish between the two.

"We argue about this all the time," says Joan Gordon, an editor of Science Fiction Studies, an academic journal. "Loosely speaking, science fiction is scientifically plausible and about that which is possible." Fantasy, on the other hand, is concerned with neither.



Gordon adds there may be some validity to women gravitating to fantasy more than science fiction, "but we hope that division is crumbling, just like the division that says women are more interested in the arts and men in the sciences." In fact, women are more drawn to science than ever: From 1996 to 2006, the number of female graduate students in science and engineering fields grew 30 percent, from 162,000 to 211,000, according to the National Science Foundation, and an interest in science could of course predispose women to science fiction.

At the Sci Fi Channel, Howe says, fantasy "doesn't just mean swords and sorcery, but includes the world of magic, supernatural, the paranormal. And women are more open to the paranormal and supernatural than men are."

That means even traditional science fiction shows like Battlestar Galactica are being produced with an eye toward female viewers. Three years ago, when the network revived the show -- which originally aired from 1978-80 -- it did so with a jolt of estrogen: The spaceship's captain, Starbuck, who was played by Dirk Benedict in the original series, is now played by Katee Sackhoff.

"We'll look at a script and we might say, 'It's great for men, but we have to make sure that women are interested, too,'" Howe says. "We might say that something seems alienating to women and the writers might need to focus a little more on relationships than space battles."

Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, notes that in general science-fiction shows, once typically set in spaceships centuries in the future, are increasingly Earth based and set in the present or near future.

"Outer space doesn't fascinate us like it used to and maybe that's because outer space has been to some extent de-romanticized," Thompson says. "We've sent Rovers up to Mars and there's nothing up there." Earth-based plots are more, well, down-to-earth.

According to David Poltrack, chief researcher for CBS Corporation, CBS' sci-fi shows are tending, atypically, to skew female because they include romantic elements. Romance, for instance, is infused in Ghost Whisperer, about a married woman who can communicate with the recently deceased.

What shifted the paradigm, says Thompson, was The X Files, which premiered in 1993. The character of Scully (Gillian Anderson) "feminized the sci-fi show," he says.

Sherryl Vint, author of Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, and Science Fiction, agrees. "I think Scully was important for a lot of women fans," she says, adding that "she's the one who is the scientist and focuses on logic and reason-values typically associated with male characters." The Mulder character (David Duchovny), on the other hand, "goes largely on intuition," she says.

Vint cautions against characterizing women's interest in science fiction -- either producing it or being a fan -- as too recent a development. Feminist science-fiction novels were popular in the 1970s, for example, and even a space-based standard-bearer like the original Star Trek in the 1960s was groundbreaking, casting Nichelle Nichols -- a woman and an African American one at that -- as Uhuru, an officer.

Going back much further, Frankenstein originally published in 1818, is considered by many to be the first work of science fiction -- it was, of course, written by Mary Shelley.

The Great Escape

While on TV the genre is making greater strides with women, more men are tuning in to sci-fi shows as well.

"When the times are tough, programs that deal with something beyond the real, objective world become more fascinating," says Poltrack. "And times have been relatively tough with the war and the economy. In our research, we hear a lot of people talking about these shows and using the word 'escape.' That's a word coming up a lot in focus groups and program testing these days."

Back at the Sci Fi Channel, they're stirring escapism, reality, science and fantasy all into the same cauldron.

On the Jan. 9 premiere of Ghost Hunters International, a spin-off from the original Ghost Hunters, an investigator named Donna LaCroix is in a chapel in the reputedly haunted Chillingham Castle in England. In one hand LaCroix, who earned a degree in civil and environmental engineering, holds a camcorder, hoping to gather evidence, a decidedly scientific impulse. In the other hand: rosary beads.

The camera, which indicated it had 20 minutes of power left, suddenly goes dead. ("When a spirit tries to manifest itself, that's one of the signs," she explains later. "It drains battery power, or any source of power around it, to manifest itself.")

"Did you shut this camera off?" LaCroix says into the darkness. "If there's any negative entities here, you are not allowed to hurt us. I have my rosary in my hand and it's protecting me."

LaCroix, it turns out, was not alone.

She was being watched by 2.8 million people, the largest reality-show audience in the Sci Fi Channel's history. More than half of them -- 54 percent -- 2014;were women.

Andrew Adam Newman is a frequent contributor to 'The New York Times' whose articles also have appeared in 'New York' magazine, Salon and Portfolio.com.