Male vs. Female Authors on my Bookshelf

Every couple of months or so some well-intentioned woman or ally shows up in my feed and tells me that I need to purposefully choose books by female authors, otherwise my own subconscious gender-bias will cause me to mostly read books by men. Or, a variation, that since the industry is gender-biased I would by default end up reading more books by men. Normally I completely disregard these posts. I can not usually be bothered to look at the name of an author before I choose a book. I read what sounds interesting, and a lot of the times when I’m done and writing my review I find myself digging for the book and saying “Who was the author again???” It’s unlikely that I will change this habit that I’ve been building since I was in elementary school when I would literally walk up and down the aisles with my eyes closed to pick a book at random. (I do NOT recommend this as a book-choosing method as I rarely found books I enjoyed.) Sorry, not sorry.

Most recently, however, someone directly aimed a comment at me telling me personally that I needed to be intentional. This person, I happened to know, reviews mostly young adult books. I couldn’t help but sigh and roll my eyes. If there’s one genre I’m confident I’m reading PLENTY of books by women in, it’s young adult.

Which got me thinking. I mentally went through my bookshelf and thought of my favorite books. The more I thought, the more it seemed to my brain that I actually read MORE books by women. I’m sure that’ not the case, it’s probably closer to 50/50, but it really got me wondering.

So I thought it might be fun to actually go count.

Rules

• Count ALL authors in a genre, even the embarrassing ones
• Only count an author once, regardless of how many books they’ve written
• If I know for a fact they used a pen-name, choose actual gender
• If I don’t know the author’s gender offhand I must look it up, I can NOT skip the book!
• Books with multiple authors that have both genders will be skipped.
• Genres will be chosen based on how they’re organized on my bookshelf. For example, I have mystery mixed in with fiction because I only own like, 3 mysteries. So no mystery genre.

Hypothesis

“Classic Literature”, which on my bookshelf is defined as any realistic fiction written before I was born, will certainly be dominated by men. I don’t feel bad about this as there’s not a lot I can do to change the way women were treated in the past. Science Fiction may also be skewed in favor of men, we know it’s a male dominated genre, however my sample size is so small I’m not sure it’s REALLY representative.

Young Adult I think will have about twice as many women as men. I also predict that my “Contemporary Fiction” (any realistic fiction written after I was born) will have more women authors, though not by as large a margin.

I’m most interested to see the outcome of kids books, since I’ve been collecting those for about 30 years, there’s a whole bunch of them, and the times they have a changed since I was a kid.

Well… Here goes nothing!

Classic Literature

• Male Authors: 25
• Female Authors: 12
• Notable books by women:
  

Contemporary Fiction

• Male Authors: 13
• Female Authors: 16
• Notable books by women:
  

Science Fiction

• Male Authors: 10
• Female Authors: 1
• Notable books by women:
  

Fantasy

• Male Authors: 14
• Female Authors: 7
• Notable books by women:
  

Kids

• Male Authors: 16
• Female Authors: 25
• Notable books by women:
  

Young Adult

• Male Authors: 5
• Female Authors: 7
• Notable books by women:
  

Religion

• Male Authors: 19
• Female Authors: 2
• Notable books by women:
  

Non-fiction and Memoirs

• Male Authors: 12
• Female Authors: 10
• Notable books by women:
  

TOTAL

• Male Authors: 114
• Female Authors: 80

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AAAAAAANNNNND just for funsies let’s look at the books I read last year, because obviously I don’t own every book I’ve ever read.

• Male Authors: 14
• Female Authors: 27
• Notable books by women:
  

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Okay! So some of what I was expecting, some of what I wasn’t! I’m frankly shocked at how few young adult books I have. Almost all of them are by Rick Riordan. I guess I don’t keep very many of those books, because I read plenty. Certainly explains why my margin was so off, looks like I’ve gotten rid of a lot of my YA books by women. Most of the rest of it was about what I expected.

EXCEPT. The overall number. I didn’t know what to expect, but not to own almost 40 MORE male authors! Breaking it down, this mostly because of 2 genres: classics and religion. Classics I said from the beginning I knew would have a lot more male authors, but I was genuinely surprised about how many more men there were on the religion shelf. I guess in hindsight I shouldn’t be surprised, because the church has never been known for giving voice to women. Even in the 21st century so many evangelical Christians believe that a woman has no place as a teacher. Too bad, really. (In my own defense, almost all of the religion books belong to my husband, anyway.)

Still, overall I don’t think this shows a disproportionate number of books written by men, ESPECIALLY when you look at how many books I read written by women last year (most of which were checked out from the library and therefore are not on my bookshelf). Literally, guys, I read almost twice as many female authors last year. I think it’s safe to guess that without thinking about it I probably get a close to even mix.

What I think would be a much more interesting conversation would be the number of books on my bookshelf written by minorities. Because if I’m being honest, it’s probably not a lot. But that’s a bigger discussion for another day.