Women read male authors, but few men read female authors. Can you believe this, in 2023?
Research shows that for women authors, only about 19% of their readers are men and 81% are women. But for male authors? 55% are men and 45% are women.
This may help to explain why so many women authors use initials instead of their given names, so their gender is not immediately revealed. Sadly.
This might simply be a perception problem. It turns out that once men have read a book by a woman, they tend to like it as well or better than a book by a man. In Goodreads, the average rating men give to books by a woman is 3.9 out of 5; for books by men, it’s 3.8.
But men just don’t PICK UP a book by a woman as often.
Is it just a perception problem? “That’s a chick’s book,” I can hear a guy say with a degree of derision. There is certainly that piece. But perhaps there is a real, natural divide, that we can’t get away from. Men don’t want to watch “chick flicks” and they don’t want to read a “chick’s book.” Because it’s about love, family, relationships, and about communicating deeply and sharing emotions. That’s not really their thing. (For most men, anyway.) Just as I don’t particularly want to watch macho, testosterone adventures, at least not all the time! And as for gratuitous violence, I can truly do without it. So maybe there’s a natural division.
Comments? I’d love to know what you think.
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The Guardian published a very good article about this very conundrum, and it covers the research data:
GUARDIAN ARTICLE: Why do so few men read books by women?
By MA Sieghart (a woman)
“No matter if it is Austen or Atwood, the Brontës or Booker winners, data shows men are reluctant to read women – and this has real world implications.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women
ALSO, the Literary Gender Gap: another recent article: https://lithub.com/why-are-so-many-men-still-resistant-to-reading-women/
Why Are So Many Men Still Resistant to Reading Women?
“Maybe the men assumed that novels by women weren’t as good, but how could they tell if they weren’t even reading them?”
Do you remember the first book you passionately loved? I sure do. It was “101 Dalmatians” by the wonderful Dodie Smith, that I first read when I was about seven or eight. My dad was a librarian, and he brought it home for me. I fell so in love with it that I wouldn’t give it back! He kept telling me it had to be returned, that I couldn’t keep it. So I started copying it. No, not with a copy machine, but by hand!! I was determined to write out every single page of that book so that I had it forever.
And so it began. I raced home from school every day and sat scrunched over my little desk, writing out the book, word for word. I got to page forty-five, before my dad found a way to take pity on me. He told his boss at the library what his little daughter was doing, and she finally gifted me the copy.
This is a rough cover, just to inspire me as I wrote. And not even sure of the title yet. Remains to be seen.