soon all literary prizes will be women's prizes

it's not that men are being overlooked, they're choosing to opt out

The Booker Prize Shortlist was announced yesterday evening at a reception at Somerset House in London and for the first time in the prize’s 55-year-history only one man made the cut — the American writer Percival Everett for James, his retelling of Huckleberry Finn.

The other nominees, Samantha Harvey, Rachel Kushner, Anne Michaels, Yael van der Wouden and Charlotte Wood, make up an international cross-section of voices of all ages and experience and are from America, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia and Britain, respectively. The prize jury remarked that the female dominated list came as ‘surprise,’ but in fact it should be anything but.

The womany angle is, of course, generating headlines and controversy of the predictable sort. Just this morning BBC Women’s Hour hosted a panel discussion this morning on the subject of the woman-heavy list with tepid question: Does an author’s gender matter to you? The question irked me as I listened, washing the dishes, not just because the answer was eye-gougingly obvious (of course not, duh) but because it ignored the far more salient and interesting point which is that literary prize lists are finally beginning to reflect state of the contemporary novel — which without the work and financial support of women would have died long ago.

Here’s a dose of stark publishing reality: Men barely read or write fiction anymore. In the global fiction publishing market, males have effectively self-selected out en masse.

According to a report in the Guardian, the figure of female book buyers relative to men is as high as 80%. Broadly speaking this gender gap was always there, but in recent years, data also shows the reading gender gap has widened, especially in fiction. Add to this the fact that fewer male fiction writers are being published and you begin to see the overall trend.

As someone who has published three books internationally with major publishers, two of which were fiction, I can also tell you that women dominate the publishing industry at all levels. In twenty years of authoring I have never worked with a single man who wasn’t an agent or an executive. Not a single male publicist, editor, copyeditor, proof reader, commissioning editor or assistant. The gender disparity in publishing is as startling and stark as the pay is low.

But before you cry ‘reverse sexism!’ consider that research also shows women are far more likely than men to read books authored by the opposite gender. Editors will happily commission any quality writer whom they are certain can move books, which male authors certainly can. Given that almost all writers start out as readers, it stands to reason that if fewer men read fiction, then fewer men will write and excel at it and, by logical extension, fewer will end up on prize lists. This isn’t systemic inequality but depressing common sense. It’s not that men are being shut out of the fiction market, they are choosing to opt out.