![]() Like many institutions, the publishing industry has long been accused of gender bias. Why doesn’t the publishing industry seem to recognize this? The data seems to say that, today, books by women are as valuable to the book-buying public as books by men. So far, this might look pretty OK to you. It turns out that in the 1990s, colleges started training people to produce non-genre fiction at record rates.īetween 19, the number of people earning MFAs in creative writing tripled. While we can’t say for sure why literary fiction trended toward parity, or why it regained popularity over It’s a tension thatĮxists in many industries: what does well in the box office may not win an Oscar. There’s clear market signal that women authors are just as commercially viable as men. ![]() The major literary prizes still skew male, but in the case of novels, For better or for worse, literary fiction is more prestigious than genre fiction. Its change over time closely matches the overall gender ratio, shifting from extreme bias in the 1980s to close Most best-selling books fall into this category, and Today, the Literary/None category is our best candidate. If we are looking for a single category to explain why women are better represented among best-selling authors Writing for mostly female readers about mostly female experiences of love and sex. By theġ980s, female authors solidly dominated the genre, probably because female writers had a natural advantage ![]() Sayers,īest-selling romance novels were mostly written by men in the 1950s, but in the 1960s women took over. Were dominated by a quartet of female authors known as the Queens of Crime: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. The 1920s and 30s are known as the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction," and Mystery is the most balanced genre over time, which shouldn't be No small thanks to paranormal romance novels. The horror/paranormal genre is now almost at gender parity, owing ![]() Then, there are the genres that have flipped. These categoriesĪlign with stereotypes about male interests: fantasy and science fiction, spy and political fiction, suspenseįiction, and adventure fiction, have all been consistently male-dominated since their introduction to the list.Ī best-selling female fantasy/sci-fi author today is just as rare as a best-selling female literary author in Best-Selling Novels by Author GenderĪlmost every category started out as heavily male-dominated, and many have stayed that way. Weekly 10-15 best-selling books since the 1940s.īy taking the set of books that made it onto the list each year and looking at the gender of the authors, weĬan track the changing relationship between author gender and commercial success. The Best Seller list is the equivalent of the Billboard Hot 100 for literature, tracking the List is one way to gauge how being a female writer today might be different from 70 years ago, in Shirley The gender ratio of the authors on the New York Times Best Seller I want to think that if a woman says she's a writer, today, people accept “I'll just put down housewife,” she said. The following exchange with the receptionist: She’s best known for “The Lottery,” which is one of the most famousĪmong the Savages, Jackson wrote about going to the hospital to deliver her third child, and having Shirley Jackson was a literary superstar of the 1940s, 50s and 60s.
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