It’s No Wonder Why So Many Men Avoid Books Written by Women
But that’s not exactly benefitting them — or our society
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If you’ve ever taken a literature or writing class or even just looked at the winners of the most prestigious writing awards, you might be under the impression that literature is predominantly a man’s game.
But women have always written, too.
Women wrote in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Era. They wrote poetry, fiction and non-fiction. And, perhaps most importantly, they wrote despite their gender standing in their way — which some masked by taking pen names — and despite not having access to education, the ability to earn an income or a ‘room of one’s own’, as Virginia Wolf argued in her seminal essay by the same name.
Still, quite a few female writers managed to write and can be considered literary trailblazers. Apra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, published in 1689, is regarded by some historians as the first novel published in English, while Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein is often cited as the world’s first science fiction novel.
The first woman to earn a living through her writing is thought to be the late Medieval writer Christine de Pizan, who started writing in part out of necessity — she was a widowed mother of three, left with no inheritance or income — and who also wrote the first work written by a woman, in praise of women, and against the belief that they’re ‘naturally’ inferior to men, The Book of the City of Ladies.
Today, women actually write and sell more books than men. Globally, women are also more likely to be avid readers, more likely to read daily, and more likely to have read more books in the past year than men. According to one survey in the US, an average woman reads 14 books a year, compared with nine books for the average man.
But there’s another gender gap among readers that’s even more concerning, although not necessarily that surprising.
Ahead of its winner announcements for fiction and, for the first time, non-fiction prizes, the UK charity Women’s Prize Trust recently released new research on gender bias in reading habits. Drawn from a sample size of almost 54,000 books purchased in 2023, it shows that while women read books by both women and men, men overwhelmingly reject books written by women in favour of male authors.
More specifically, the analysis shows that for the top 20 bestselling female fiction and non-fiction writers purchased in the UK in 2023 — which includes Agatha Christie, Harper Lee, Lisa Jewell and Rhonda Byrne — less than 20% of purchases were made by men. And the majority of these purchases were classics rather than contemporary works. In contrast, for the top 20 bestselling male fiction and non-fiction writers — including Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Stephen King and Robert Kiyosaki — 44% of purchases were made by women.
Overall, only one of the top 20 bestselling female writers was purchased mostly by men — Harper Lee — while seven of the top 20 bestselling male writers were purchased by women.
Women’s Prize Trust has also previously commissioned research showing a growing — yes, growing — pay gap between male and female non-fiction authors, with female authors’ median earnings falling by 16.6% over the past five years and the gender pay gap increasing from 33.3 to 35.7% over the same period. Moreover, the research showed that female non-fiction writers face less visibility in book prizes and the media than their male peers: only 35.5% of books awarded a non-fiction prize over the past ten years were written by women, and just 26.5% of non-fiction reviews in UK newspapers were allocated to books by female writers.
This aligns with previous research as well. In particular when it comes to gender bias in reading.
A study by Nielsen Book Research commissioned by Mary Ann Sieghart for her book The Authority Gap found that readership for the ten bestselling male authors is roughly evenly split by gender, with 55% male and 45% female readers. However, just 19% of the ten bestselling female authors’ readers are male, compared to 81% female.
The pattern in non-fiction is similar: women are 65% more likely to read a non-fiction book by the opposite gender than men.
Additionally, when men do read, they typically only reach for books with male protagonists, which is partly because there are far more books featuring them. One study examining 104,000 works of fiction dating from 1780 to 2007 uncovered that women were actually better represented in… Victorian novels than in modern ones. It also found that books by men rarely give women much character space, whereas in books by women, the division is close to equal.
Children’s books are no exception, with another paper suggesting that among the top 100 children’s books, male characters — both human and non-human — in leading roles outnumber female characters two to one.
In other words, men are not only disproportionately less likely even to open a book written by a woman, but to read a story about one.
And this bias sadly exists outside of the world of books, too.
I once made the mistake of telling a man I dated, who claimed he was really into cinema, that one of my favourite directors is Sofia Coppola, only to be asked, ‘who?’
When I listed some of my favourite movies of hers — The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation — he huffed and seemed almost irrated by my taste in film. Sure, her movies usually focus on the female experience, with all its complexities and contradictions, but you’d think that shouldn’t make them any less interesting to a male audience. Yet it still seems nearly unfathomable that a piece of art created by a woman, especially about women, could be enjoyed by (gasp!) men.
Meanwhile, women enjoy work created by men about men all the time, and no one finds it weird or indicative of poor taste — quite the contrary.
This is tied to a phenomenon I touched upon in a recent piece. For a long time, the male perspective was seen as the ‘default’, and still largely is, so, naturally, everyone ought to appreciate it. But the female perspective is merely a ‘niche’ only women could enjoy.
And that extends to practically the whole entertainment and arts world.
A 2019 Spotify analysis revealed that their male users listened to 94.2% of male artists, 3.3% of female artists, and 2.5% of mixed groups. In contrast, female users listened to 55% of male artists, 30.8% of female artists, and 14.2% of mixed groups. The idea that there’s such a thing as ‘girly’ and ‘manly’ music and that one is inferior to the other also becomes painfully evident in the way some men talk about the pop genre, considered ‘girly’ and thus inferior.
Similarly, some men tend to perceive movies with female leads as ‘chick movies’ not worthy of their attention. And even if they watch female-led movies, they rate them, on average, much lower than male-led movies. (Something to keep in mind the next time you’re looking up a movie’s rating if it has a female lead in it; it might not necessarily be reliable.)
Reading novels was once seen primarily as a ‘female’ activity, too, reserved for a class of women who didn’t receive formal education in science and politics and hence couldn’t handle more ‘intellectually demanding’ literature. The gender gap in fiction readership remains considerable today, with surveys suggesting that women account for up to 80% of fiction book sales and that their purchasers outnumber men in most categories, apart from fantasy, science fiction and horror.
The belief that reading fiction is ‘feminine’, which makes it seem less valuable and important, may also play a role in that. Heteronormative expectations still dictate what men can ‘safely’ enjoy without appearing ‘emasculated,’ and that sadly starts really early on. But when it comes to reading habits specifically, it’s not just that.
Research also shows that while women, overall, read more frequently to their children than fathers, men are less likely to read to their sons than daughters. And that is bound to impact men’s lives later on.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone say, ‘men just don’t understand women’ or ‘men just find it harder to put themselves in other shoes,’ well, you know how the saying goes. Men’s apparent inability to empathise is too often framed as simply a result of their biological ‘hardwiring’ and something they ‘can’t easily change.’
I won’t get into why men can be as empathetic as women here, but I wrote extensively on this topic just a few months ago.
Anyway, there’s a pretty straightforward — and enjoyable — solution to men’s lack of empathy: reading. In particular, reading work by and about people whose experiences differ from their own — including women.
Yes, it’s reading, specifically reading fiction, that’s been shown to activate the temporal lobe — the language processing centre of the brain — and lead to increases in blood flow in areas of the brain associated with physical movements and sensory experiences. In other words, reading fiction puts you in someone else’s neurological shoes. For instance, if you read about a character eating an apple, it lights up the part of your brain that activates when you taste something acidic. You might even start salivating.
Unsurprisingly, several studies found that reading fiction can indeed increase empathy, pro-social behaviours, and emotional intelligence. In comparison, one study that assessed frequent fiction readers, non-fiction readers and non-readers found that the latter two groups scored much lower on the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ test, which measures cognitive empathy.
It’s then not surprising that men so often see the world through an almost entirely male lens and fail to understand women’s lived experiences, which then impacts their relationships and can even lead to prejudice and discrimination, affecting our whole society. But would we still live in a world that seems to take (at least) one step back every time we take two steps forward for gender equality and where women’s empowerment is so often perceived as a zero-sum game that men must resolutely oppose if all men were to read fiction and books written by women? Perhaps not.
Reading stories from people who differ from you in terms of gender, but also race, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, social class, etc., allows you to take on someone else’s perspective and broadens your mind, yes, but it also helps you see the universality of the human condition.
And that’s a realisation that could do more for greater equality and inclusion than possibly many other things.
Gender in literature, like in any other field, shouldn’t matter. It will only truly stop to matter, though, when female authors start being treated the same way as male authors.
But they still aren’t, which ultimately hurts all of us.
Men miss out on understanding the other half of this world and becoming more empathetic, compassionate, and emotionally responsive. Women lose by having their work seen as niche rather than mainstream and sometimes even considered of ‘lesser value’ than men’s.
So the next time you search for a new book to read, why not seek a voice you haven’t heard from yet?
That question that men have lamented about over the generations.. that one about "what do women want"? That question is always asked in a "whiny" kind of way insinuating that the problem is with women. I think if men were more open to learning about women by first coming out of their man caves and becoming more interested and observant of what we have to contribute, that question could be put to rest.
Reminds me of why double blind review was introduced to the peer review process for academic journals. Because it just didn’t matter how hard you tried to wish gender bias away, it remained. Somewhere deep down, reviewers and editors couldn’t help but see scholarship as just a little less authoritative when it came from a woman.
The solution? Blind review, yes, but also more consciousness and efforts to get women on journal boards and conference panels and the like.