Sex and Reading: A Look at Who's Reading Whom

Stacey wrote: "I like books written by both sexes depending on what I'm in the mood to read, but I suspect I've read more female authors this year. A good question to ask is who the main character is? Is the cha..."

If you like a female protagonist, read Amy Lynn, you'll dig it, and for a short time it's only .99 on Amazon. Read the reviews, give me a chance :-).

Saurabh wrote: "You could have used the title as "Gender and Reading" instead of "Sex and Reading"
Or are you in hunt of eyeballs?"

It is polite to refer to the way a person identifies on a "Male/Female" spectrum as their "sex." It is polite to refer to how a person performs "Masculine/Feminine" as their "gender." Most websites ask for sex instead of gender for profiles. Not saying that this infographic respects sex/gender manners perfectly, just that the title is correct, not an eyeball grab. Refer to genderbread for more info.

I do pay attention to gender and I think if you further defined it by sexual orientation you would find it was skewed even higher to same sex authors.

Arnav wrote: "Why is EVERYTHING these days phrased in gender terms? These very analyses make people think in those terms and thereby calcify those boundaries."

That's the opposite of true. People ALREADY think in terms of gender, in very calcified ways, and only by talking about it and becoming conscious of it can you crack the calcified crust and regain some flexibility. Your gender opinions are trained into you unconsciously, and you never think about them unless someone points them out to you.

Not talking about gender is the same as just "keeping things as they are", which is sexist and unfair to women.

This is the same argument white men make about race. Why are people talking about race? I'm a white man, and I don't notice any race problems! Etc. etc. etc...

I, too, have never paid attention to the author of a book, and after going through the books I've bought and read, nearly all of them are female.

The only books that I took authors into consideration are all the memoirs I bought which are by famous comediennes like Ellen, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Mindy Kaling.

David wrote: "Arnav wrote: "Why is EVERYTHING these days phrased in gender terms? These very analyses make people think in those terms and thereby calcify those boundaries."

That's the opposite of true. People ..."
Not talking about sex gives space to transgendered authors (or mixed sex authors).

Everytime I see talks about sex of authors its always men vs women like mixed sex pair of writers and transgendered writers wouldn't exist. Seriously, this sort of talk is artificial. I can't even fit a bit

Saurabh wrote: "You could have used the title as "Gender and Reading" instead of "Sex and Reading"
Or are you in hunt of eyeballs?"

Gender is a grammatical term.

Alejandro wrote: "I read books not matter if the author is a man or a woman, that's not a factor to me to decide to read it but about what it's the story. And I read all kind of genres, even the ones that are typica..."

Some people don't have enough to worry about.

Levi wrote: "The interpretation of "In the first year of publication men's books have a 50/50 audience, women's books have an 80/20 audience" is NOT "everyone likes their own gender more," it's "women read book..."
I doubt .1 or .2 is statistically significant.

usually i don't care about gender of the author ,i am looking for the good book

While this is interesting I think the statistics could be improved by investigating whether genders prefer reading from their own gender's point of view. Authors do not always write from their own gender's perspective so these results could potentially be impacted by that, at least it's something to consider in future.

I often find it easier to read a novel from my own gender perspective, and this is regardless of author gender.

If its a good story...I'm reading it. Gender really does not play a part in my choices.

Eva wrote: "If its a good story...I'm reading it. Gender really does not play a part in my choices."

WERD!

I definitely read more books by women than men, but I still like reading books from both genders if it's a good book. There's plenty of author's that also right as another gender, so you can't always determine the type of author, because there's also a lot that change their writing style based on the name they're writing under as well.

Arnav wrote: "Why is EVERYTHING these days phrased in gender terms? These very analyses make people think in those terms and thereby calcify those boundaries."

I totally agree with you.

Books are just books! Anyone can write 'em, therefore anyone should be able to read 'em. Let them be!!

Kayla wrote: "While this is interesting I think the statistics could be improved by investigating whether genders prefer reading from their own gender's point of view. Authors do not always write from their own ..."

Me too, Kayla!
With the exception of John Green's books (all but one of his narrators are teen guys) I do seem to read more books with female narrators than male narrators.

This is an interesting article - I never thought to 'categorize' my books this way!

There is no correlation between the quality of a book and the gender of it's author

Girls tend to be more emotional than men and I think books that carry the "girly" mood give them the satisfaction to feel the deep stuff. I am a girl but I tend to read the interesting subjects and a few tear jerkers haha.

Doesn't matter the gender as long as the writing style is good and understandable.

At the end of the day, a more interesting article would be a deeper look at the reader demographics, and content or genre or what have you of the book rather than the gender of the author. I suspect there is an actual difference in what male and female READERS are looking for, which has little to do with the gender of the AUHTOR. And any differences in author readership are a consequence of how they end up in various publishing houses, and the fact that a lot of authors start out writing what they like reading, which ties into the demographics.

Kama wrote: "
If there choose based on sex, then it creates discrimination. The same with job recruitment.
"

That's...a ridiculous statement.

As these comments show, most people don't care about gender when choosing books, but I don't think that matters when proving the validity of the infographic. Goodreads is showing a coincidental turn-out, not a conscious choice. As other comments have shown, some people are surprised to find, after examining their reading for the year, that they have read more of one gender than another. Some are finding the opposite.

For that group here that DOES consciously choose based on gender, gravitating more toward male or female authors for whatever reason, nothing wrong with that either.

Gent wrote: "At the end of the day, a more interesting article would be a deeper look at the reader demographics, and content or genre or what have you of the book rather than the gender of the author. I suspec..."

I agree and think these considerations helped make these numbers. As I said before, it's probably because a lot of women/men lean towards certain genres, which happen to be primarily written by men or women. (i.e., mainly women read romance, most romance written by women...)

I'm curious about other infographics they can come up with - age, demographics, etc.

As long as a tale is told and told well....what does it matter? Does it matter if a soufflé is made by a male chef or a female chef? No, as long as the right ingredients are there!

As Stephen King said...'I just want to tell a story'.

I don't think theres always something wrong with choosing an author of your own gender, men and women face different challenges and judgements in this life and if you're looking for an author to be a "friend" to relate to in your own life struggles its natural to choose your own. Not that both can't write good stories, I mean if you specifically want someone to relate to in reading about the struggles of life people tend to want author of their own gender, nationality, social class, personality type.

I read a lot of female authors in my fave genders (not as much as I should - they are too man dominated) but If someone wanted a book with someone talking honestly and frankly about the struggles of being a man I imagine it would be Hemmingway etc.

I just checked what I have been reading and what I am reading this year... Only one is written by a woman... And I kind of stopped reading it (not as interesting as the title suggested).

I need some recommendations! I like physics and psychology books... and not so smart but captivating novels!

Love this! I read both sexes, don't even look at the author when trying something new!

Wonderful, beautiful use of language - page turners are not for me. Which is why I love Gibbon.

There's no regard for people who aren't cisgender in this infographic, that's a sad thing.

I really don't care about the gender. I just pick a book that I like and "CLEAR THE MECHANISM."

Aura wrote: "The Silkworm is not fairly placed in the male authors list; we all know Robert Galbraith is JK Rowling! And she rocks!"

bugged me too.

Just for giggles I check my reviews on Amazon. Some you can't tell male or female, but the ones you can I have way more female readers. It's like 2:1. I think women in general read more than men do. It's not an indictment one way or the other, it just is.

same here , as most of you, Evn don't pay any attention to the author's gender.
I actually read books on recommendation or if any book that is making some news... Any way gender is of least importance when i pickup a book and i dont remember discussing it EVER.

Look at some of the biggest sellers of the last few years:

Harry Potter series: JK Rowling
Hunger Games series: Susanne Collins
Divergent series: Veronica Roth
Twilight series: Stephanie Meyer

I think this should answer the gender question.

I was actually just thinking about this today, now the question is did the readers know it was by a woman or man when he or she read the book, if so, then the results are skewed by the readers expectations.
Also shouldn't we also asses if the narrator or protagonist is male or female? I know that I at least prefer reading books from the point of view of a women, but maybe that's just me.

I so rarely pay attention to authors. It's pretty common for me to walk in to a bookstore and have no idea of the authors name :P so I'd like to think I'm pretty un-biased, but of course there always will be some kind of preference (don't know if mine is male or female, though :) )

Christina wrote: "There's no regard for people who aren't cisgender in this infographic, that's a sad thing."

Kudos for bringing that up, although I am only partially familiar with the term. Is that the same thing as saying that only binary sex categories are being considered here? It does seem misleading to omit "Other" in the tables, because I know there are authors and readers that don't specify "Gender" in their Goodreads profile. Did they just discard those data points?

The idea that race, sex, or gender are immutable, definable categories is an illusion. But I think discussions based on these categories can still be useful as a starting point, like looking at statistics on race to uncover our unconscious (or conscious) biases.

Joseph wrote: "Look at some of the biggest sellers of the last few years:

Harry Potter series: JK Rowling
Hunger Games series: Susanne Collins
Divergent series: Veronica Roth
Twilight series: Stephanie Meyer

I think this should answer the gender question."

Um, no. First off you can't just pick series. Second off, it sounds like you are just listing off ones you've seen in the news/movies. Here is the actual list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_...

Focusing on books instead of series, only 19 of the top 55 best-selling books of all time are by women. (Much gloomier statistics when you consider seven of them were by the same woman, J.K. Rowling) Of course, many of those are old books when women were not considered or allowed to publish. (Winner is A Tale of Two Cities, for example.) You can create a list of more recent books if you like.

I went ahead and did that for best-selling series published in 1997 or later (when Harry Potter came out), since you implied it is female dominated. In fact, in order to get a list with your 4 titles in it, I had to use the top twenty-two best-selling series from the list, of which only 7 (32%) are written by women:

Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling (female)
Robert Langdon - Dan Brown (male)
Chicken Soup for the Soul - Jack Canfield (male)
Twilight - Stephenie Meyer (female)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid - Jeff Kinney (male)
Fifty Shades of Grey - E.L. James (female)
Millenium - Stieg Larsson (male)
Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket (male)
Jack Reacher - Lee Child (male)
Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (female)
Harry Hole - Jo Nesbø (male)
Inheritance Cycle - Christopher Paolini (male)
Captain Underpants - Dav Pilkey (male)
Rich Dad, Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki (male)
Sword of Truth - Terry Goodkind (male)
Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare (female)
Southbeach Diet - Arthur Agatston (male)
Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer (male)
Malazan Book of the Fallen - Steven Erikson (male)
Rainbow Magic - Daisy Meadows (ghost writers???)
Southern Vampire Mysteries - Charlaine Harris (female)
Divergent - Veronica Roth (female)

And while this may or may not say anything about men dominating series book sales, the fact is you can't really use 22 data points to say anything about the thousands (millions?) of authors out there and whether they have an equal shot at publishing based on their sex. Which is why I have a problem with the "most popular books" statistic Goodreads uses in their infographic. And which is why I wish Goodreads would give us averages of all 40,000 readers in their list and the sex of the authors in their read shelf. I'd be curious what biases exist there. (Maybe it all averages out to 50/50 and so they couldn't include it to titillate us???)

I thought I was the only person who really didn't pay attention to authors - I'm glad I'm not. Very rarely do I pay attention to who the author is when I buy a book. Besides worldwide known authors, I never know if an author is well-known or not. If I read a book that turns out to be shitty, then I'll pay attention to the author since I'll be weary of reading other works by him/her. When it comes down to gender, I don't think I prefer either gender. Looking at my pathetic little collection of books, though, I do notice more male authors. I don't solely focus on who writes the book. I focus more on how well it is written and if I think it's just the most amazing thing ever, I'll look more into the author.

I don't think there's anything wrong with preferring a certain gender. If you prefer only female authors, then go for it. If you prefer only male authors, go for it. If you prefer any other gender, then go for it. You do you; however, variety can be good sometimes! Don't shy away from a gender for no particular reason.

This was pretty interesting, though. Some of the things that were recorded actually surprised me. As someone else said, I'd love to see different infographics based on age, location, etc.

Like many, I don't look at the gender of the writer, but on the book blurb and other's recommendations.

What I find interesting is that results were based on what those 40,000 people actually bought and read, rather than if they were consciously choosing a male or female author. You have to wonder how much gender really does come into play.

For example, my brother in law was a beta reader for the first book I ever wrote (never published). His comment was: It got really good halfway through when the action started happening. Up until then, it was too much self contemplation for my tastes. LOL. Was the issue a female versus male way of looking at the world, or was it just bad writing on my part? I'm inclined to think mostly the latter while still peppered with a good measure of the former.

Wouldn't it be interesting to see a poll taken on that aspect of story telling? On a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being the highest, how much do you like self introspection in a character struggle? Or do you prefer straight out action with little or no introspection?

Glenn wrote: "Like many, I don't look at the gender of the writer, but on the book blurb and other's recommendations.

What I find interesting is that results were based on what those 40,000 people actually boug..."

Interesting point. I would thing a balance between set-up and action would be critical. We always have to answer the why question. I don't think that is gender specific. Oddly enough someone just wrote a blog post comparing my first book, Amy Lynn, to another bringing up similar points. Here it is if you would like to read it.

http://tlknighton.com/?p=6861

I personally do not care for the author's gender when choosing books. Books are my passion, the writer's gender has nothing to do with my preference. Interestingly enough though, I have realized that the books I enjoy more are by women authors. Could be a coincidence I presume ^.^

What Do you mean when you say that you don't care what the authors gender is?

I really don't care about the author's gender, I actually never thought about it, to be honest. What I really care is about the book itself, I mean, its story, writing, characters and so on.

This infographic made me go back to my lists and do a quick survey of what I read this year so far (I've never paid attention to the author's gender before), and although there's a good combination (23M, 14F), it seems I tend to prefer books written by male authors.

Interesting!

99.9% of my books are published under female authors.
Who's to say it's not a male author with a female pen name? lol

I don't really think about the author's gender when I read. I mostly don't even know the gender of the author of the books I read. For me its all about the book. Whatever the gender of the author is doesn't matter.

Very interesting! As a lover of legal thrillers, I read books by lots of men but as a mystery lover I gravitate to female based detective series with female authors. Of course, as a lesbian, I like lesbian themed fiction that is mostly, of course, written by women (and a very small sprinkling of men who use a woman's pen name and 'pass'). I'd say I probably have a 70/30 female to male split on my bookshelves.

I really dont pay attention to whether an author is male of female.

There are so may books I have read, where I dont remember the author.

If the authors style of writing really appeals to me, then I will read several books and their name will stick, be it male or female.

In addition I tend to read alot of espionage,adventure and legal thriller & crime which are mainly written by male others.

The fantasy and other novels I choose based on the blurb and writing style could be male or female.

The non-fiction novels I read are generally by male authors.

I am more interested in the story line than what gender the author is.

I will confirm that I have read more books by male suthors TO DATE.

Deborah wrote: "I really dont pay attention to whether an author is male of female.

There are so may books I have read, where I dont remember the author.

If the authors style of writing really appeals to me, t..."

I know right? I feel that way too. The lasts books I read where I can tell you anything about the Author was Linda Lafferty's three books. That was quite a few books ago.

at my age I like reading about sex