Statistic needed: who is buying and writing books?

November 14, 2005 10:49 PM

I recently read something about bias in the publishing industry, but can't find it now. The piece said that novels/books of poetry are mostly purchased by women, yet there are still significantly more men authors than women. Has anyone else read this and know where I can find the information again?
posted by rockstar to society & culture (3 comments total)

There was this article about the NYTimes Book Review that was published in the Village Voice

This article is about the gender gap in academic publishing

Some raw stats about the SF/F/H publishing industry including some male/female breakdowns.

The gender gap and the harvard Law Review

Links to some dicussion of the gender gap in literature prizes

The Guardian writes about the reading habits of different genders
posted by jessamyn at 6:23 AM on November 15, 2005

Wow, OK I am going to be late for work now because I've just read through all those articles. What an interesting subject.

The one thing I don't see addressed in the gender gap in literature prizes: Do women write the same number of books as men? Only the articles on sci fi / horror / fantasy and on Harvard Law Review actually address this, while people with varying agendas seem to make self-serving assumptions toward both ends.

The SF/F/H article suggests that men do win more than their fair share of some awards, but many awards are given out in proportions that make sense -- 30-some percent of entries are by women, and 30-some percent of winners are women. In some cases, women do better than would be expected, and in almost all cases the lot for women is improving. Male reviewers do seem to give a shockingly disproportionate amount of their attention to other men, though. It's a good thing there are a lot of women reviewers out there to balance the scale in this genre.

The Harvard Law Review column suggests women submit fewer pieces.

The insidehighered piece had some interesting theories suggesting other reasons why women may be under-represented:

including a lack of mentoring in graduate school, competing family and professional demands for young female academics, and a skepticism on the part of some leading journals on publishing work about gender issues.

I'm not convinced about the last of those points.

And the author of the study cited in the Village Voice article comes across as rather screechy, even if the NYT book review editor also seems like an idiot, resistant to critique.

Although rather shallow, I think the Guardian article is the most insightful of the lot.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 8:07 AM on November 15, 2005

Nice summary croutonsupafreak! I agree that none of the articles really seems like the one that rockstar remembered reading and I'll see if I can find that one.
posted by jessamyn at 11:05 AM on November 15, 2005