In January, my young friend Anna and I inventoried authors by gender on the “New Fiction” shelves of our public library. That count came to 123 novels and short story collections written by women, 64 authored by men.
The disparity came as no thunderbolt to me, as I’d noticed for several years the number of titles by female authors outnumbered those by men. I was also aware that this imbalance was a universal condition not confined to my library. Anna, who writes fiction, was, I think, happily surprised by this difference, which told her she had a better shot at being published.
This gap between female and male fiction writers exists not only in the United States but in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia as well, and occurs for several reasons. A 2022 survey found that more women read fiction than men by almost 20 percentage points, a figure that has held steady for years. This difference produces more female novelists and an audience for their work. Additionally, more than 80% of librarians and library assistants are female, which means a woman most likely orders the library’s books, as is the case in my public library.
But it’s the world of publishing that chiefly accounts for these increasingly unequal numbers in the past decade. In both Great Britain and the United States, women dominate this industry. Depending on which stats inquirers trust, females in publishing comprise between 71% and 78% of the workforce. Most of the women are “progressives,” as noted in the YouTube video, “The Female Dominance of Fiction Has Become Ridiculous.” If you can get past the ludicrous and at times disgusting images of the video, you’ll find that the fast-talking narrator delivers some remarkable statistics.
In “The War on White Male Fiction Writers,” screenwriter, novelist and essayist Lou Aguilar addresses the diminished presence of white male writers, particularly those under 40. Here’s just one case in point: the sudden absence of such writers on the New York Times prestigious “Notable Fiction” list. “There was not a single young white male millennial on the 2021 and 2022 lists, only one in 2023, and one again in 2024,” Aguilar writes. “In other words, only two of 72 millennials on the list were white men.”
Aguilar’s essay was inspired by Jacob Savage’s “The Vanishing White Male Writer,” which Aguilar calls “one of the most disturbing yet culturally important articles of the decade.”
While some interested in the current state of literature clearly find this trend disturbing, it is also one more sign of the ongoing feminization of American culture. Markers of this change are everywhere. Women outnumber men on college campuses by a wide margin. More women than men are enrolled in our medical schools and our law schools, a difference which is still growing. The number of women serving in Congress in 2023 was a record high and will likely continue to increase.
Oddly, we still hear noise from some quarters about the patriarchy and the oppression of women. March 8th brought us “International Women’s Day,” with its theme this year, “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.” Meanwhile, we’re winding up another “Women’s History Month,” which celebrates women who shattered glass ceilings while mostly ignoring the importance of motherhood, marriage and homemaking.
For better and for worse, America has spent the last 50 years replacing a patriarchy with a matriarchy. The “oppressors” have become the oppressed.
It’s past time for a course correction in our culture and its disregard and often disdain for boys and young men. We can begin by ranking competence over gender, race, or sex. Equally as important, we can begin paying more attention to the nature and nurture of boys. For all too long, we’ve ignored our nation’s sons while elevating its daughters. The hour has come when we should help rather than hinder boys in understanding and embracing their masculinity, recognizing that their educational needs and development are different from those of their female classmates.
Who knows? One of these young men may someday write a novel about that liberation and actually find a publisher.
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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: (Flickr-Alliance for Excellent Education, CC BY-NC 2.0)
