Women, Men and Fiction - NPR Article about Gender Bias in Book Reviewing

[notveryalice]

In 2011, they found that The New York Review Of Books reviewed 71 female authors and 293 male authors. In The New York Times, it was 273 women and 520 men.

Now, this kind of thing could be happening for lots of reasons, and like a lot of really complicated problems, it likely doesn't involve anything that anybody is doing on purpose, and therefore it doesn't lend itself to easy solutions through simple resolve. How several hundred books make it into a publication in a given year is the result of countless conscious and unconscious choices by readers, by authors, by book publishers, by reviewing publications, by reviewers and editors — it's an incredibly complex and unwieldy problem to try to get your arms around. You don't have to believe anyone is out to get women writers in order to think it's important to ask the question of what the factors are that bring us to that point and to suggest that it's not a great place to be.

I found this article worrying and well-reasoned--especially after I went to my perfect agent's "clients" page and counted up the men vs women. Even with a generous count (ambiguous names all counted as women), the male:female ratio was 8:1.

I hope this thread is in the right forum, and that you can help me muddle through this problem. How do I go about circumventing these odds?

The link to the full article is below, on the NPR website. There's an interesting back and forth between authors who think this discrepancy is significant and those who don't.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/...ion-notes-on-how-not-to-answer-hard-questions

 

[Kissmequick]

Circumventing the odds of getting reviewed there? Or getting an/that agent?

If the odds of say getting reviewed in the NYT, well don't write genre for starters. Other than that...I don't know. It sucks. But it's possible to be a great writer and have a bajillion sales and not get reviewed there.

Getting that agent?

Well, we'll say for argument's sake that he's not a raging misogynist. Write a bloody good book that he thinks he can sell, that's how you beat the odds. That's how you get any agent.


The whole thing is thorny, tbh, I mean look at me, I'm writing under a male name despite not having the right appendages. The reasons for that are many, but.. yeah. It happens, it sucks, just got to write the best you can and work with what you've got.

 

[Dante DiBenedetto]

I can't comment about reviews, but agents-wise, here in the States, almost all of my bookmarked SFF agents are women. It's a pretty hefty list, too.

Kissmequick was pretty spot on, though. Don't expect to hit the NYT for genre fiction.

From what I understand, even most professionally published authors need to do a lot of self-promoting to get reviews and product awareness out there. There might be some level of misogyny those regards. I can't really comment on it, as it's never affected my reviews, let alone willingness to review the product.

It's difficult for me to understand and empathize with misogyny/chauvinism, and I'm also a youngster (25) so there might be some more qualified people to comment on this. My apologies.

 

[Abernovo]

I'm not as up on NYT and the NY Review of Books as I am on The Guardian and The Times/Times Literary Supplement, but I suspect there are two things that are pretty much identical about all of them -

• they're snooty about 'Literary' novels, trying to create an artificial boundary between them and anything they deem as 'mere genre'; and (indeed, possibly because)
• they're too often written by men, of a certain age and background, stuck in the mud of upbringing and their own innate prejudices**

This results in stilted coverage of who gets reviewed. One question that should be asked is why a broader range of books and authors are not adequately reviewed. Unfortunately, I think it comes down to having to search for a good agent and sending books and stories for review to a publication that will actually give it a chance - again, a search.

**There's a film reviewer in The Guardian, that I developed a complete distaste for. I won't say his name, as he's said to be litigious, but unless it was an art flick, he has a habit of writing them off, sometimes ripping the actors apart about previous movies, rather than addressing the movie he was supposed to be reviewing. I've seen similar things in literary reviews.

 

[billhafan]

getting the word out on a book seems to be the key - regardless of Gender - and then getting reviews, which fuels the success or failure of a book. Agree that some mainstream reviewers in newspapers seem to stick to "Literature" and Artsy stuff; it seems to be the favoured products of the so-called culture-vultures, and high regard seems to be given to any book that is considered high-brow, regardless of sales volumes and mainstream popularity. A few years ago, there seemed to actually be a bias towards female authors - and I guess this was to redress the balance - I didn't adopt a pen-name to take advantage of this perceived bias, though