He Reads, She Reads, Part Two

When it comes to the genders’ reading habits, I’ve been operating on antidotal evidence so far. But Steve ran down an interesting article from the May 29, 2005, issue of the GUARDIAN we vaguely remembered reading: “Women are still a closed book to men: Research shows men mainly read works by other men.” It seems that when a couple of academics from Queen Mary College in London researched the topic, they found that four out of five men said the last novel they’d read was by a man. Interestingly, none of the men would actually admit that the gender of the author had any influence on their choice of a book. Yet many of the men couldn’t even name an important book written by a woman.

In a more recent article, “Men Dominate Waterstone’s Favorite 100,” Hon Howells, spokesman for Britain’s largest book chain, Waterstone’s, says, “Women read more than men—the core customer is a woman aged between 35 and 55—but what they read is right across the board: chick lit, crime fiction, biographies, heavyweight novels, and they don’t care about the gender of the author. Subconsciously, I think men stick to male writers. They think that what women write doesn’t appeal to them.”

In a subsequent study, when the academics from Queen Mary College asked men and women to list the books they found most influential, six male authors made it into the women’s top 20. Only one woman made it onto the men’s list: Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. It turns out that Ms. Lee’s androgynous first name led many men to mistake her for man.

Tess Gerritsen tells a story about a booksigning at a Sam’s Club where her media escort approached a male customer picking up a stack of thrillers and suggested he try one of Tess’s thrillers. The customer’s response? “Naw. I don’t read books by women. I don’t like the way they write.” The kicker in this tale is that when Tess looked at the books he was buying, she realized that two of them were actually ghostwritten by women. All of which suggests that it isn’t so much that men don’t like reading women’s stories. Many men simply don’t like reading books with women’s names on the cover.

Yes, I know this isn’t true of all men. Steve reads books by women authors. And just as I find macho strut male adventure stories unreadable, I can understand that men wouldn’t find chick lit or romances enjoyable. I can’t read most of them either. But women write many other kinds of books, and these studies suggest a level of knee-jerk prejudice that I find troubling.

From a practical standpoint, it’s also made me very glad I’ve chosen two male pseudonyms.