The Women’s Prize for Fiction is currently running a survey to find the top ten ‘essential books for men written by women’. The press release promoting the survey claims that “most men simply don’t read books by women”. Support for this claim is provided by research by Mary Ann Sieghart (who chairs the 2022 judges’ panel) in her book The Authority Gap. This research was based on the top ten bestselling female fiction authors including Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood and Agatha Christie which showed that only 19% of their readers were men and 81% women. For the top 10 bestselling male authors (including Dickens, Tolkien, Lee Child and Stephen King), the split was 55% men to 45% women. Whether you can extrapolate national reading habits from just 20 authors is debateable, but the general finding – that men read more men authors than women authors – seems right.

Why should that be – why don’t men read more women authors? The Women’s Prize approach seems to suggest that it is simply because there are loads of great women authors out there that men aren’t aware of. It has prepared a list of sixty books by 56 women and is inviting people to vote for their favourite. (The vote closes on June 6th 2022). Obviously this is a way of getting more attention for the prize itself, which is fair enough, but I wanted to consider the reasons why men don’t read women.

The list is interesting. The vast majority of the nominations are from the twentieth century or later. Jane Austen is ignored, as is Emily Bronte. Charlotte Bronte appears but her recommended novel is Villette, not Jane Eyre as you might expect. Arguably this is because everyone already knows about Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights – the purpose of the exercise is to recommend less well-known works. It’s not surprising that there is a degree of well, to be blunt, virtue-signalling in some of the nominations: Ian McEwan nominates We Had to Remove this Post by Hanna Bervoets, which was published in May 2022, while Andrew Marr nominates Ali Smith’s Companion Piece, also published in May 2022. Andrew Billen nominates the relatively ancient The Candy House by Jennifer Egan which was published way back in April 2022. Several of the other novels nominated date back as far as 2018. Are these really novels that will attract men to read them, or do these nominations tell us more about the people making them?

So why don’t men read women authors? Is it simply that men haven’t come across the novels in this list before? That seems unlikely. The Handmaid’s Tale is not really obscure is it? The list includes three Booker Prize winning novels (Girl, Woman, Other, The Sea, The Sea, and Possession). Novels such as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (which won the Pulitzer Prize) have sold vast quantities and surely need no further promotion. It’s not so much that the novels in the list aren’t the right ones (although authors such as Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge should have been mentioned, and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet should be on every must-read list) but that awareness isn’t the issue. Men know about women authors but choose to read male authors.

There aren’t any easy answers here but I wonder whether the issue can be traced to childhood reading habits. There’s evidence that boys read fewer books and spending less time reading than girls. Once genre reading patterns are established in the early years then they can be difficult to shift.

Men should read more women authors, but that’s not going to happen by exhortation alone. Perhaps this reading gap is a reflection of a more serious gap between the sexes in society?

Men Reading Women