Getting men to read women's issues

From the Brontë sisters to J K Rowling, it has long been understood that women publishing under a male pen name can do wonders for broadening the pool of your prospective readership. But this isn’t a fact resigned to literary history: research published in 2021 found women are still 65% more likely to read non-fiction by men than men are to read books by women.

Whether the reason for this large discrepancy is because women authors are not awarded as much authority on certain topics by men, or because male readers presume women authors are not writing for them, the end result still means that women authors face a likely drought in members of the opposite gender picking up their book off the shelf.

This particularly matters when you’re writing a book targeted primarily at men. When you’re desperately trying to teach men about a topic long considered to be only women’s work.

Following the reversal of Roe v Wade in the USA, we’ve seen how it can be all too convenient for men to ignore issues considered to only affect women (even when it is frequently men making those very same decisions that harm women). Similarly to the abortion debate, the narrative about violence against women has mistakenly been that it is nothing to do with men.

This means these discussions have long taken place in spaces only occupied by women – preaching to the choir. But this only creates echo chambers, comforting but not change-making.

In writing How Men Can Help, about how men can become allies, one of the first problems was the frustration in having to teach men about harms that are so cripplingly obvious to women. 

For women, living with knowledge of men’s potential for violence is both excruciatingly conscious and at the same time so ingrained as to be invisible. It sits deep within us. It is self-preservation. It is the reason I have never walked alone through a park after dark, I sit near other women on the train and I always know who is walking behind me. It is omnipresent. When something is so influential, it can feel infuriating to have to point out the obviousness to others.

Writing for men about women’s issues is both rewarding and relentlessly frustrating but is driven by my strong belief in the capacity for change. 

It is anger-inducing to understand that the men who live alongside us can be so blissfully unaware of women’s instinctive fear. But the statistics reflect this lack of understanding: in 2021 Police Scotland found three quarters of women said groping or grabbing was a regular experience for them, but only a quarter of men thought it was common. Only half of men thought cat-calling was frequent but three quarters of women said it was. 

In building a bridge, it required reaching an olive branch out to male readers. Rather than experiencing frustration and anger at their lack of knowledge, seeing it as a moment for education, learning and change. This lesson was not always an easy pill to swallow.

I was also confronted early on with accepting that many men do not want to hear this message – the #NotAllMen sentiment still bubbles up. A YouGov survey in 2019 shed light on this when 27,000 people were asked which of these two views came closest to their own: "There is room for improvement among all or nearly all men and it is right to ask men as a whole to be better" or "The problems blamed on men as a whole are only caused by a small minority and it is wrong to blame all men for it". A huge 58% chose the second option, with 29% choosing the first and the remainder undecided. The focus remains on the fault of outlying individuals rather than any collective responsibility for change.

Another challenge in presenting these issues to a male audience is the extent to which men believe they listen to women, versus the reality. One 2012 study by a psychologist at Yale University found that when male executives spoke, more often they were seen as competent, whereas female executives were seen as less competent the more they spoke.

A 2014 study from George Washington University found both men and women interrupted when speaking to a woman more than a man. The annual McKinsey Women in the Workplace report of 70,000 employees found in 2019 that half of women had experienced being interrupted or spoken over (the number was higher among LGBTQ+ women and disabled women). In knowing this, it sometimes felt difficult anticipating how much men would listen to what I had to say.

Writing for men about women’s issues is both rewarding and relentlessly frustrating but is driven by my strong belief in the capacity for change. Feminism by its very nature believes that things can get better, that the status quo is not concrete and walls that seem permanent can be moved. Belief that the struggle is worth the endurance and persistence it requires.

Because while people are the very thing that maintains unequal systems, they are also what can topple a system too. I believe that the future will see gender equality with men standing alongside women leading the charge. It might not be in my lifetime or yours, but it will come.