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?”