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Men drawn to books written by other men, analysis from the Women’s Prize Trust suggests
Men overwhelmingly reject books written by women in favour of male authors, new research by the Women’s Prize Trust (WPT) suggests. The data drawn from Nielsen BookData’s consumer research, collected from a significant sample size of almost 54,000 book purchases in 2023, shows that while women buy books by women and men equally, men do the opposite.
This new analysis shows that for the top 20 bestselling female writers of fiction and non-fiction purchased in the UK in 2023 (which includes Agatha Christie, Harper Lee, Colleen Hoover, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Lisa Jewell and the non-fiction author Rhonda Byrne), fewer than 20% of purchases were made by men, with the majority of these focused on the classics as opposed to works by contemporary writers. In comparison, 44% of the top 20 bestselling male writers of fiction and non-fiction (including George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Stephen King and James Patterson, as well as Prince Harry, Robert Kiyosaki and James Clear) were bought by women.
Just one of the top 20 bestselling female writers of fiction and non-fiction in 2023 was purchased mainly by men – Harper Lee – whereas seven of the top 20 bestselling male writers of fiction and non-fiction in 2023 were purchased mainly by women: Richard Osman, James Patterson, Prince Harry, James Clear, Matt Haig, Peter James and Harlan Coben.
Motivated to improve this gender bias, and to encourage more men to buy, borrow and read novels written by women, the Women’s Prize Trust has been running an ongoing consumer campaign, ‘Men Reading Women’. In 2022, the charity engaged male thinkers and celebrities – from Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Andrew Marr, to Sanjeev Bhaskar, Simon Mayo and Lee Child – to select their favourite female writer, culminating in a public poll that generated 20,000 votes in one week. In 2023, the WPT called for reading groups to sign up new male members to shadow the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist.
In 2023, the Women’s Prize Trust also published new research that revealed a growing pay gap between male and female non-fiction authors, and a comparative lack of visibility for female non-fiction writers in the media and book prizes. This campaign, which was one of the motivating factors for the launch of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024, also resulted in a significant increase in male donors year-on-year. Among these supporters, Jason Bartholomew, c.e.o. of Midas, personally donated a significant one-off payment to the Trust to enable the launch of the non-fiction prize. Alongside Bartholomew’s generous financial contribution, there has also been an increase in one-off donations and male patrons signing up to support the Women’s Prize Trust. In September 2023, actor Stanley Tucci took part in a sell-out event at London’s Barbican interviewed by founder director Kate Mosse to fundraise for the WPT.
Claire Shanahan, executive director of the Women’s Prize Trust, said: “The gender pay gap, and inequity between men and women generally, is our collective challenge to tackle, and as the latest statistics show, we still have work to do to ensure that women’s writing receives the same respect, visibility and financial recompense as men’s writing.”
The 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction will be announced on 13th June.
