Laura Miller's piece over at Salon.com sums up the what's been going on so far really well if you haven't been following along. Basically what's been happening is some researchers decided to to a quantitative analysis of books which are reviewed in 14 major publications such as the NYRB and the New York Times, and see what the difference was between the number of books reviewed which were written by men and those written by women. The results are astonishing.
Books written by men are overwhelmingly reviewed over those written by women. Not only that, but book reviews are overwhelmingly written by men, rather than women within those same publications.
Now a lot of head scratching is going on, because no one can quite work out why. In fact, studies have shown that women tend to read more diversely than men do, so if anything, the disparity ought to swing the other way, but that's not the case. Laura Miller suggests that it might be to do with the fact that male reviewers don't tend to care as much about the kind of issues women write about. Does women's writing seem 'less' important than stuff written by men? Is men's writing taken more seriously? Both male and female authors certainly have trashy names that I could roll off the tip of my tongue...
I decided to do a casual analysis of my own book list and see how I fared. I guess I shouldn't be that shocked by the results below, considering that I did pick out all these books.
Of my original 111 books, 84 are by men, 25 by women and 2 are collections.
Of the new list, 23 are by men and 8 are by women.
This leaves me with a total percentage of: 75% male authors, 23% female authors and 2% mixed.
I guess I get brownie points for being a female reviewer, right?
Like I said, I bought all these books, so how can I possibly be surprised that they are mostly by men? I'm a little disappointed in myself, because I consider myself to be a feminist and a champion of women's writing, and I can't figure out how this happened. I would have to stress that I did not consciously choose not to buy women's books.
I guess all I can think to account for how this might have happened is to go back to the original roots of this project. My aim was to get through the 111 books that I had left over from previous years. Thinking back, I have read and loved a great many books by both women and men, and I can't say with absolute certainty, but one reason that I might have so many books authored by men left on my shelves might be because they were the ones left behind.
Here are some female authors I have read and loved in the past year: Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Catherine O'Flynn, Emma Donoghue, Monica Drake, Jennifer Egan, A.M. Homes, Miranda July, Susie Orbach, Natasha Walter, Kat Banyard, Jessica Valenti, Delphine de Vigan, Charlotte Roche, Audrey Niffenegger and others, I'm sure.
Okay, I feel a bit better now.
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