VIDA and Amazon: Charting Gender Bias in Reading and Reviewing

VIDA's study of gender bias in major review publications has put in numbers to what many of us have long felt: women writers do not get a proportional amount of attention from the mainstream press.

The study is well worth a look for all interested in contemporary literary culture, and I would also recommend reading Bookslut's on-going follow-up discussion about the matter. Frankly, I'm not surprised at VIDA's findings, but I am indeed surprised that anyone would be surprised about the findings. There's quite a bit more to be said about these matters, and I'm still mulling it over myself.

I will say, though, that VIDA's lede caught my attention: "Numbers don't lie. What counts is the bottom line." First, numbers may not "lie," but that's not the same thing as telling the truth. There are a host of reasons that these numbers might be misleading (though I don't think they are).

Second, and more interesting to me, is the idea of a literary "bottom line." VIDA suggests that review ratio is the ultimate measure of cultural attention, but is that the most telling barometer? I'm not sure that it is. Measuring the activity of the gatekeepers is interesting, but isn't what people are reading just as important, if not more so?

One could measure this in several ways (library lending, NY Times Bestseller Lists, Indie Bound Lists), but since Amazon will eventually do most of the bookselling in this country, I thought it would be a good place to start. So I looked at the 100 Bestselling Books, both overall and for Literature and Fiction, and here's what I found.

Of the Top 100 selling books, 47 were written by men, 39 by women (14 multiple-author books had an author of each gender or an institutional author).  

Of the Top 100 selling literature and fiction books, 54 were written by women and 46 by men. 

This suggests to me that what we see in the VIDA statistics is not overt gender bias on the part of readers and publishers, but by the literary-critical establishment, of which The New York Times, The Atlantic, et al are the most visible members. I don't have a totalizing explanation for why this might be, but I do have an idea for some part of it: the way we think about literature and literary history.

Literary criticism tends to be interested in influence and connection: we measure the greatness of today's work through what past great works it seems to be descended from. And the riverheads of literary history are overwhelmingly male. (Just as one example, The Modern Library's list of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th Century includes only six works by women. Time's list has 16. If we were to form lists for earlier centuries, this number would certainly decline). It stands to reason, then, that male writers are more likely to seem descended from the great (male) writers of the past.

What I am suggesting is that there is a bifurcation in literary "attention" between the male-centric world of capital-l Literature, and the habits and tastes of today's readers when it comes to gender (and probably a litany of other things). Which of these "bottom-lines" is more indicative and of what? I don't have an answer, but I suspect each individual's answer to that question say something about their position in the reading world.

Is This What Gender Bias in Reading Looks Like?

Our last post about the Weiner/Picoult/New York Times fracas got us thinking about our own reading choices, as we are the breed of primate to read the kinds of books reviewed in The New York Times. If it's possible that the Grey Lady expresses some selection bias in its reviews, might it be possible that your humble, opposable-thumb sporting Ape has some bias in his reading selections?

Unfortunately, the short answer seems to be yes.

After we finish reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom sometime this weekend, The Ape will have read forty-five novels/short story collections this year, most of them new titles. Of these, only eight are by women. Even more startlingly, none of the women writers were of color.

We are not happy about this. It seems that if we reading according only to our taste, we overwhelming choose writers like us: white, male, and American (though we go out of our way to cover contemporary American writing, so that last one is not a surprise).

Some gravitation towards sameness is neither shocking nor undesirable, but the imbalance here is dismaying and is cause for some self-reflection. How did this happen and what is to be done about it?

Some of this is contingent: burning through all three of Stieg Larsson's books and and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy perhaps skewed the numbers. Still even last year, of the sixty-one novels/story collections we read, only fifteen were by women, somewhat better than this year, but still not a ratio we're comfortable with.

Perhaps as Picoult and Weiner charge, there is a bias in mainstream book-reviewing and that bias, paired with whatever our own biases are, materially affects the authors we read. Perhaps we've overlooked some serious, talented women for reasons that are not fully realized.

Perhaps the genre itself is skewed; perhaps it is dominated, for reasons either related or not to our own biases, by white men. Here are the female writers of American literary fiction with new books (either paperback or hardback) we've read this year: Julie Orringer, Lorrie Moore, Hilary Thayer Hamann, Amy Greene, Jennifer Egan, Aimee Bender, and Michelle Hoover. Who have we missed? Jane Smiley has a new book, but we've always been lukewarm on her. Is that the smoking gun, our relative lack of excitement for Jane Smiley?

For comparison's sake, here's a gender breakdown of The Millions' most anticipated books of 2010: forty-two total, eight by women--a ratio that seems oddly familiar. And yet not at all comforting.

We're going to thinking about this further, but are also interested to hear what others make of this. We're particularly interested in titles we might pick up to fill in whatever gaps we've missed from women writers over the past year.