{"id":10021,"date":"2012-12-12T18:38:49","date_gmt":"2012-12-12T23:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/?p=10021"},"modified":"2012-12-12T18:42:18","modified_gmt":"2012-12-12T23:42:18","slug":"women-writing-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/archives\/10021","title":{"rendered":"Women Writing Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two different articles today on women writing as men: the WSJ article, Why Women Writers Still Take Men’s Names<\/em><\/a> which looks at fiction in general, and the iO9 piece that focuses specifically on SFF<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ve long had a preference for female main characters in my SFF, but haven’t been very particular about mysteries, so I decided to see how my reading preferences have panned out for the past several years.<\/p>\n

I didn’t categorize by genre–hey, I’m doing this all by hand as it is!–but did have five gender categories: male authors, female authors, women writing under initials or male pseudonyms, men writing under initials, and male-female partnerships.<\/p>\n

The last category is pretty much Ilona Andrews<\/a> and Phil & Kaja Foglio<\/a>, and was not folded into any other category.<\/p>\n

So what did I discover?<\/p>\n

Over the period of 2009 to 2012, I read 556 books. When I divide those books by the (known) gender of the author, I get:<\/p>\n

Male authors: 44.4%
\nFemale authors: 53.1% <\/p>\n

That’s actually a pretty even split, considering. From correlations, it’s also dependent upon what genre I’m reading: in 2010 I read a lot of mysteries, so I ended up reading more books by male authors (53.4%) than female authors (45.3%). This year I read primarily fantasy, so the authors I read were predominantly female (69%).<\/p>\n

\"Genre<\/a><\/p>\n

What is interesting is how things look when I break down those categories further.<\/p>\n

Male: 43.9%
\nFemale: 46.4%
\nMale Initials: 0.5%
\nFemale Initials\/Pseudonyms: 6.7%
\nTeam: 2.5%<\/p>\n

(That 0.5% for male initials was exclusively<\/em> T.A. Pratt<\/a>‘s Marla Mason series.)<\/p>\n

The percentages are much closer when we compare male names to female names.<\/p>\n

And if I add female initials to the males instead of the females (which is what both articles are suggesting happens when female writers use their initials), I get a higher percentage of authors with male names:<\/p>\n

Male Names: 50.54%
\nFemale Names: 46.40%<\/p>\n

(I’m leaving T.A. Pratt and the team writers out of this calculation.)<\/p>\n

Now, I admit that (with the exception of Girl Genius) I classified comics and anthologies under the name of the writer or editor. So an anthology could have primarily female authors but been compiled by a male editor. And the issue of comics is even more of a gray area, but as this was done out of curiosity, not something I’ve compiled for publication that needs to pass scientific rigor, I don’t care if you don’t like my classification system. :P<\/p>\n

So, even though I have a stated preference for books with female characters, which tend to be written by female authors, male names or pseudonyms still seem to come up on top.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting, but also sad that women still have to pretend to be men to sell books.<\/p>\n

\"Author<\/a><\/p>\n

Compiled from my book blog: Random Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two different articles today on women writing as men: the WSJ article, Why Women Writers Still Take Men’s Names which looks at fiction in general, and the iO9 piece that focuses specifically on SFF. I’ve long had a preference for female main characters in my SFF, but haven’t been very particular about mysteries, so I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reading"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pefxA-2BD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}