Reading Across the Gender Line

Yesterday, Salon.com's Laura Miller posted an article lamenting the fact that fewer books by women are reviewed in the press than books by men, and that, furthermore, there are fewer female reviewers in these book review publications -- such as The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Harper's -- than there are male reviewers. Miller quotes statistics posted by Vida, an organization for women in literary arts. Miller also points to a comment by Ruth Franklin, noting that fewer books by women are reviewed because fewer books by women are published. By most estimates, this turns out to be true (in the world of literary fiction, at least). The question with all of this is why? Why are fewer books by women published and reviewed?

Miller provides an answer:

The imbalance in books published is indeed a puzzle; book publishers, like any other business, want to make money, and multiple surveys indicate that women buy and read far more books than men do. (This fact has long been established within the book business, but since some Salon readers have questioned it in the past, please see the National Endowment for the Arts "Reading at Risk" report.) If women were only -- or even primarily -- interested in books by women, the logic of the marketplace would dictate that publishers should release more titles by female authors.

And here's where we have to get anecdotal. There's really no hard data on how many books by male authors are read by women readers and vice versa, nor are we likely to ever see any. But try this: Ask six bookish friends -- three men and three women -- to list their favorite authors or favorite books, without explaining your motivation. Then see how many male authors the women list and whether the men list any female authors at all.

Oh, but we do have the statistics! We have data on how many books by women are read by men and vice versa. In 2010, of all the reviews posted by male users on Goodreads, only 18.3% of them were of books written by women. In contrast, 38.6% of the reviews posted by women were of books written by men. You don't have to be Bill James to see what this means -- last year, women were more than twice as likely as men to read and review a book by an author of the opposite gender.

Why is this the case? I can't say. I've tried hard to recognize my own reading prejudices, though I'm aware I could stand to diversify my shelves quite a bit more. I've also learned that there's no ground to be gained in shaming people about what they choose to read. Still, I echo Laura Miller's sentiments when she says: "A novelist I used to know once defiantly informed me (apropos of nothing we'd been talking about) that he'd never read a Jane Austen novel and had no intention of ever reading one. Deeming him something of a lost cause, I kept my mouth shut, but it was clear he expected me to get indignant, and to scold. Instead, I could only look at him with pity. The loss was entirely his."

I am proud to say that Goodreads has been quick to recognize the many great books published in 2010 that were written by women. In the 2010 Goodreads Choice Awards, books by women took home 16 of the 23 awards, including Favorite Book of 2010, Best Fiction, and Best Non-Fiction. Of course, Goodreads represents a different world than that of a traditional book review publication. We welcome readers of all books, whereas the focus of The Atlantic, for instance, is highly literary and somewhat narrow. Our membership is also majority female (and it's not even close). So perhaps it makes sense that Goodreads members would be more likely to recognize female authors than the literary establishment is.

I'm fond of ending posts with a question, and the question in this case is obvious: How parochial are your reading habits? Do you tend to read books only by men or women? Do you think about this at all when you're choosing what you'll read next?