bookshelf gender statistics
A while ago, I read a column by a guy who said he'd always thought he read equal parts male and female authors, but when a girl dared him to make inventory of his bookshelf, it turned out the names in it were overwhelmingly male. He then talked about this experience with another guy, who bristled: of course he read equal parts male and female authors! This other guy then went home and counted, and it turned out that he, too, had mostly books by male authors.
This caught my interest. Spontaneously, I would have said that my bookshelf is overwhelmingly full of female authors. So after reading this column, I figured I'd make a count and see if it was correct.
The count is now finished. I have counted each volume as a book, whether it's the first half of a longer work or a collection of shorter ones. I figured it'd even out in the long run. Books written by a number of people of both sexes I have marked in both columns, unless one sex is overwhelmingly predominant.
The final tally is 310 female, 281 male. So while it's more even than I would have thought before reading the column, the women are still ahead.
What was interesting and unexpected for me, was the differences in genre, made very explicit by the way my bookshelf is organized. All the way through nonfiction, the men were many times more than the women. Books on religion were almost entirely by men (which, considering the religious environment I grew up in, doesn't surprise me), but so were books on theatre - by which I don't just mean plays, but analyses too.
In biographies, the women started to show up more frequently. By classics, we got Jane Austen and Selma Lagerlöf, who brought up the count. Modern literature, comedy, and comics did little to change the stats. Fantasy had 30 Diana Wynne Jones books, but also 18 Terry Pratchett books. Still the numbers were quite equal at that point. Crime, with the 38 Agatha Christie books, was what finally weighed the scales down on the female side. Children's lit tipped them a little bit further, leading to the final count.
So it seems I read a lot of fiction by women, and a lot of nonfiction by men - or at least I have, over the years. Maybe I need to shake things up a bit. :-)
This entry was originally posted at http://katta.dreamwidth.org/514745.html and has
comments there.
This caught my interest. Spontaneously, I would have said that my bookshelf is overwhelmingly full of female authors. So after reading this column, I figured I'd make a count and see if it was correct.
The count is now finished. I have counted each volume as a book, whether it's the first half of a longer work or a collection of shorter ones. I figured it'd even out in the long run. Books written by a number of people of both sexes I have marked in both columns, unless one sex is overwhelmingly predominant.
The final tally is 310 female, 281 male. So while it's more even than I would have thought before reading the column, the women are still ahead.
What was interesting and unexpected for me, was the differences in genre, made very explicit by the way my bookshelf is organized. All the way through nonfiction, the men were many times more than the women. Books on religion were almost entirely by men (which, considering the religious environment I grew up in, doesn't surprise me), but so were books on theatre - by which I don't just mean plays, but analyses too.
In biographies, the women started to show up more frequently. By classics, we got Jane Austen and Selma Lagerlöf, who brought up the count. Modern literature, comedy, and comics did little to change the stats. Fantasy had 30 Diana Wynne Jones books, but also 18 Terry Pratchett books. Still the numbers were quite equal at that point. Crime, with the 38 Agatha Christie books, was what finally weighed the scales down on the female side. Children's lit tipped them a little bit further, leading to the final count.
So it seems I read a lot of fiction by women, and a lot of nonfiction by men - or at least I have, over the years. Maybe I need to shake things up a bit. :-)
This entry was originally posted at http://katta.dreamwidth.org/514745.html and has
comments there.