Author Gender percentage

Has anyone else checked the gender breakdown of their authors on LibraryThing? The latest State of the Thing newsletter had a blurb about it:

"Gender Breakdown. Ever wondered what percentage of your library is comprised of male vs. female authors? You can see those stats on LibraryThing! A number of our members have been discussing the gender breakdown of the authors in their own libraries on Talk http://www.librarything.com/topic/173015. You can see these stats (and more) by making sure you're signed in to LibraryThing, and going here (to the Stats/memes menu)."

I was surprised to see that I only had about 45% women authors listed and since I am in this group, I often seek out women authors. It was mentioned on the talk thread that people who read authors from times gone by have read more books by men because more authors were men in those days.

Did anyone else do it? How did you all fare?

While I have and do support the work of women writers and make an effort to "keep up" with new ones, I'm not going to run a statistical analysis of my authors solely on the basis of gender.

If I've got a library full of "Twilight" and Barbara Cartland romances, I don't think I'm doing better on the gender front than somebody reading, say, Ken Kalfus, Max Barry, Nicholson Baker, Italo Calvino, and George Saunders, who are male authors I like a lot.

I was getting better, but I have slid back to 70% men, 30% women. I tend to read more contemporary literature so the classics argument doesn't work with me. I have many books on my TBR list that are by women, so it is not for lack of finding them. I just am reading in a random order right now (tired, very tired) and somehow this is the result.

I'm 63.54% men, 36.46% women, but you have to take that in context, because I have quite a few classics and older literature in my library. I expect if you were to look at books published after 1950 or so, the percentage of women writers would climb.

>2 nohrt4me2:, I wouldn't have ever thought about doing it either, and I agree with you 100% about the substance being far more important than the number. Before I got the LibraryThing newsletter, I didn't even know that this statistical data was available with just a click of the mouse. But when I saw that it was available, I clicked it, and I would have been extremely troubled if it came back 95% male authors or something.

I don't know what else the statistics/memes functiosn can reveal, but I am sure that for many people the potential might be there for some unexpected information.

LibraryThing's computation options were what drew me to the site in the first place. I'm at 33.89% female authors, but that's dramatically better than the 27% I was at when I first started keeping track. My keeping at least on female authored book on the currently reading shelf, as well as devoting summers to only female authors, helps the equilibriating effort enormously.

Here's mine:

Male: 1302 : Female: 1435 : Other/Contested/Unknown: 1 : N/A: 54 : Not set 524

Percent male: 47.57% : Percent female: 52.43%

Maybe because of my girls' career romance novels, which were all written by women.

>7 amysisson:, now that's something that I never heard of--"girls' career romance novels." So I googled it and found this http://womenshistorynetwork.org/blog/?p=163 Is that what you are talking about?

>8 vwinsloe:

That's exactly it! My collection is primarily American -- there were two major American publisher series -- but I do own some of the British titles, including a few mentioned in that article. The article itself is new to me, so thanks for posting the link!

This goes directly to some cover images I posted in one of my LibraryThing threads:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/163073#4485507

>9 amysisson:. Very cool. Always nice to discover something new. Now I'll have my eyes peeled for them among the used books. Thanks.

>1 vwinsloe:

i really like this stat actually but don't read fast enough to change my percentage much so don't check it too often. i'm at 54.37% men and 45.63% women right now.

like >4 southernbooklady:, i think if we looked just at more recent stuff it would be significantly higher for women.

fyi, i think it's counting authors and not books. so i've got cormac mccarthy in my library already, and when i read his border trilogy starting next week, it won't skew the breakdown any stronger for men even though i'm technically going to be adding 3 male authored books to the library.

I have 72% men and 28% women, but that's probably because I have a lot of science books/textbooks in my library and also a lot of older fiction when the writers were preponderantly male. Almost all my female authors are contemporary or 20th century.

I'm 66.32% male, 33.68% female, which continually depresses me, since I feel like some of my most favorite authors are women. But I tend to read more than one book by an individual female author, so I think this works against my percentage. Also, I worked as a free-lance indexer for five years, and I've added most of these books to my Library Thing, and these were overwhelmingly books written by men. They were mostly on foreign policy or international development.

Like Korrick, I love that LT generates these sorts of stats. Here's my library's break-down:

Male: 299 : Female: 174 : Other/Contested/Unknown: 1 : N/A: 7 : Not set 17
Percent male: 63.21% : Percent female: 36.79%

Like others have said, this does not show the amount of books by woman that I have (and I suspect that I have way more books by women than by men). Still, I need to collect more female authors!

I'm at 60% male/40% female, but I noticed that a lot of the authors on my not set list are women. I need to pop in an update them so I can get a more accurate idea.

It would be interesting if we could see male/female ratio over a span of publication years - I know that my older books are heavily weighted to male authors.

Mine is 48.9% male and 51% female. I think that I actually read more books by women authors than this indicates though. I also wish I could remove my wishlist books from consideration. Still, interesting to know and think about.

My stats are at 52% male, 48% female. I think the female number has increased since I started watching this, but I didn't write down the original numbers. I attribute my high male number to the type of non-fiction I read. Also, I think this includes my TBR and wish lists--if it only looked at the books I've actually read, the percentage of female authors would be higher.

I currently have 54% women, 46% men in my library. I don't keep wishlists, so this is probably accurate.

My percentage is interesting. The vast majority of books I read are almost at random. I visit a public library with no clue what I'm going to come out with, I browse the shelves extensively, and inevitably come out with more books than I can read in a month.

Despite this, my library is heavily slanted towards male authors. Right now it's about 75 percent male, 25 percent female.

I've discussed this in other groups previously. It either means the genres I read are more populated by male authors, or (and I think there is something to this) male authors tend to get gender-neutral covers whereas female authors tend to get more feminine ones.

While you can find some examples, it's rare that you find books written by men with pink covers and floral designs. While I, personally, don't have an issue reading such a book, it's true that I'm less likely to pick it up when browsing book shelves in a library. I do wonder how many book written by women I miss out on simply because the publishers give them covers that don't attract me when I'm browsing books.

Interestingly, I've kept track of my reading statistics on a year-by-year basis for the past 4-5 years, and female authors have had a higher average rating than male ones all but 1 year.

Interestingly, I've kept track of my reading statistics on a year-by-year basis for the past 4-5 years, and female authors have had a higher average rating than male ones all but 1 year.

I think that's a critical point, and more revealing of someone's support of fiction by women than a simple ratio of male to female books, which measures mere quantity not quality or appreciation for what women bring to the table.

Nick Hornby is a better "women's writer" (please see A Long Way Down for example) than female romance writers who reinforce the notional that women are all about love, marriage, and being true to Your Man.

Hornby writes sympathetic and three-dimensional female characters. Not all women writers do.

Indeed. In fact, I think there could be something to be said for genre fiction vs. literary fiction as well. I tend to like (and give higher ratings to) literary fiction. It seems most of the books I give 4-5 stars for are a bit more literary, wheras genre fiction consistently get the 3-star ratings. I also think, though I would have to look through my library and do the math, that my literary fiction is fairly evenly distributed among the sexes. Whereas genre fiction is almost entirely male.

It would be curious to see if it is true, and whether or not women who have the opposite distrubtion (75 percent female, 25 percent male) have higher male averages - not because they like male authors more, but because they write male and female literary fiction similarly, but give female genre fiction lower ratings, thus lowering the average rating for female authors in their library.

Whatever the explanation, not only do women get higher average ratings but last year 4 out of my top 5 favorite books were written by women, a seen here. :)

Finding quality necessitates seeking out a greater quantity. Both should be aimed for when it comes to giving writers of all demographics a fair chance.