Once upon a time, women authored less than ten per cent of all new books. In the Victorian era, women like the Bronte sisters had to write under a male pseudonym to get their work published. More than a 150 years later, women publish more than 50 percent of all books, and the average female authored book sees greater sales and readership than a male authored book.
Studies from the US, UK and Australia all confirm the same upward trend. Nearly 70% of new books have female authors in Australia according to a 2022 survey by Macquarie University, over 60% in the UK according to the Office for National Statistics and just over 50% in the US according to Wordsrated Author Demographics. How did women make that progress?
Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management suggests there was a tipping point. “There was a sea change around 1970,” he says. He points to several factors including the arrival of birth control pill in the Sixties and the introduction of more labor-saving technologies like washing-machines and vacuum cleaners. The decreased burden of domestic workloads, together with greater reproductive choice gave women freedom to pursue careers.
Simultaneously, women also began investing in their education. Universities saw a steady increase in female students from the Seventies onwards. By 2020, women had become the majority of college and university graduates in many Western countries. From elementary school to college, girls now outperform boys in academic work, according to the US 2022 Women in the Workplace Study by McKinsey.
“The progress women have made in the book market can be seen as one small part of the broader feminist movement,” says Greg Rosalsky in US National Public Radio’s Planet Money. “However, women continue to lag behind men in many parts of the labor market, including many creative industries. Women still account for less than 20 percent of movie directors and less than 10 percent of cinematographers. Why are books different?”
Joel Waldfogel who worked on data analysis from the US Copyright Office as a visiting scholar suggests that perhaps the process of book-writing is typically a solo endeavor, in which the author has more power to choose when and how to do the work.
But the fact that the book publishing industry itself is dominated by women cannot be ignored. Seventy-eight percent of editors within UK publishing are female according to the UK Publishing Association, a trend that is mirrored in the United States and Australia. “The energy, as anyone in the publishing world will tell you, is with women,” wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr in her excellent article How women conquered the world of fiction, published in The Observer two years ago when the media woke up to the fact that the names on prize shortlists and best-seller lists were primarily female ones.
Her article was significant because it showcased a generational cultural shift. Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan no longer dominated media buzz while writers like Patricia Lockwood, Octavia Butler and Sally Rooney did. This year’s International Booker prize shortlist reflects the same trend with four out of six of the shortlist finalists being female. The book publishing industry is also now substantially more inclusive of writers of color, another long overdue shift.
But Thomas-Corr also points out that although the current era of female dominance is largely seen as positive – not to mention overdue – there are also dissenting voices among publishers, agents and writers who feel that men – especially young men – are being shut out. She reports that men who work in the publishing industry dare not even speak on the record about the subject for fear of a backlash.
The subject can easily become fraught. But books have always been pathways to different voices and perspectives, innovation, and change. Culture, and literature as a reflection within it, has always been a shifting tide. Is this the end of the story? It seems likely that the tide is likely to continue to shift.
Lucy Broadbent is a British journalist living in West Hollywood, California. She has worked as a columnist for the Independent, Marie Claire, She and Hello! magazine, writing about her life in LA. She is also a contributor for Women Love Tech and The Carousel.
