Over at Salon.com, Laura Miller wrote an interesting article about the gender gap in literature. Her article is a wonderful mix of hard data and educated guesses, with just a touch of well-informed opinion to get the juices flowing. You should read the article yourself, but, if you don’t have the time, I’ll try to explain it quickly: women are underrepresented in the world of literature. Fewer books are reviewed by women, fewer female authors get their books reviewed, and fewer female authors get their books published, and all of this despite the fact that women read more books than men. Those are the facts as put forth by Miller, and those facts have remained true for as long as anyone has thought to ask those questions.
The most recent conversation about this issue has focused on the attention Jonathan Franzen’s newest novel has received. The question not only about why women don’t get reviewed with the same frequency as men, but also why doesn’t Jennifer Egan (a superior talent to Franzen) receive the same type of love that the male receives, why is this happening, what can we do, and who’s to blame?
The blame game is, by far, the most active conversation of them all, and one simple answer is this: if critics reviewed women and men in equal number, then the gender inequality in the book business would end, therefore the critics are to blame. The problem with easy answers is that they can sound good without the benefit of being good. As Miller’s article points out, books by female authors are reviewed in roughly the same proportion as they are published, about 30% percent of the pie. If the critics are reviewing exactly what the publishing business is giving them, how can we blame the critics?
So, let’s blame those giant publishers who only publish boring, made for the masses best sellers, and start supporting the indie publishers. But indie publishers are doing even worse than their behemoth competition. Just look at McSweeney’s, a publisher that I love. They are doing a very bad job of publishing novels by female authors. Nobody, or nobody I’ve seen, is publishing as many books by women as they are by men—and let’s not get so crazy as to think that some brave publisher might actually print more books by women than men. So, can we blame the mass publishing business for being biased towards men when even the most progressive publishers are doing a bad job of putting forth a product that is gender equal? But the publishers work for me, the reader. They’ll print what I ask for, so if you and I and all our book nerd friends made a point of reading with an eye towards gender equality, couldn’t we make them change? Surely I can’t blame myself, can I? Well, maybe. I run a book group here at the bookstore, The Voyage Out Book Group, and I checked what we read against that 30% reviewed/published number. The results would not be surprising to Miller, but they were surprising to me: we’ve just picked our thirtieth book, and we’ve read just ten books by female authors. Scary. We fit right in with what the critics and publishers are telling us to do.
This problem has been argued about at bookstores since before any of us was born, but the problem remains. The persistence of this inequality is baffling to me, and I’m a part of the problem. I work in an industry that is kind, smart, progressive, and possibly bigoted. So I throw up my hands, furrow my brow, and say, ‘I don’t have a clue how to fix this’. Anybody out there have any advice, or possibly a solution to this problem? Please let me know, I need some help.
–Brian Contine
BookPeople 