Gender Gap in Book Blogging

[Skip O'Neal]

I think most of us have noticed that a great majority of book bloggers are women. I did a little survey and some thinking about the phenonmenon on my own blog, but wanted to see what the book blogging commmunity thinks causes such a disparity?

Any great ideas?

Thanks,

Skip

The Reading Ape 

[Marty Shaw]

No ideas on it, but I noticed the same thing...to such a degree that, in the beginning, I didn't even let people know I was a guy. I didn't lie, but intentionally avoided any possible references to my gender.

These days, the secret is out and I still have regular visitors so I guess the worry was over nothing. Still, the book review universe does seem to be dominated by women.

I'm looking forward to seeing if anyone has any ideas or opinions on why the demographics are like this.

[Book Calendar]

More women read than men, especially fiction. The reasons are just being discovered. It has been suspected for a while....
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14175229

[Skip O'Neal]

Yes, women sure do read more. But a study I linked to in my first post about the gender gap showed that the ratio of active women readers to active men readers was in the 1.5-2 to 1 range, far different than the 10-1 ratio we seen in book blogging.

[Lisa Sheppard]

What a great story!

[Pete Karnas]

The article in the above post raised a good point, albeit through purely anecdotal evidence: men tend to read more non-fiction than fiction. Perhaps they are blogging about what they read, just their blogs don't fall under the category of "literature." "Book Bloggers" as a category leans heavily towards fiction, as blogs about non-fiction works might be categorized under different headings (politics, world affairs, science, etc). I suspect this might contribute to the gender imbalance.

Pete
What You Read

[Skip O'Neal]

That may well be, but then the question is just deferred a step; why do women read more fiction/literature than men? Also the general reading numbers about reading that even when you account for all book reading, women still read a great deal more than men.

One thought I had while riding the train the other day (and seeing the number of men reading newspapers) was that perhaps this takes more of men's reading time than reading books. Again, anecdotal evidence, but of the newspaper readers I know, men outnumber women by a wide margin.

Skip

The Reading Ape

[Enbrethiliel]

+JMJ+

I'm with Pete. There may be lots of "book blogs" by men that just don't identify themselves as "book blogs" because they don't see themselves as part of this (mostly female) community.

[Skip O'Neal]

I'm not sure how to know this is true, but I've looked around and unless they are hiding in some corner of the internet I haven't found, male book bloggers are just outnumbered.

[Enbrethiliel]

+JMJ+

I'm not sure how to know it's true, either, but I like it as a theory. =P

Nor am I sure how to proceed from here. Without actually doing some research into the causes of this imbalance, one is left making generalities like, "Well, women like doing memes and blog hops more"--or "Women are more likely to join a book club, anyway, and book review blogs are like that."

[Skip O'Neal]

Yea, I don't know how to proceed either. I'm actually not even sure it's terribly important that women read more and blog about books more than men do.

As a guy who reads, it's more a personal interest I suppose than a pressing issue for publishing or reading in general. I do think there must be some fundamental reason for the difference, but it may well be so complicated that it's impossible to trace.

[Henry Brown]

Wow. Just a couple days ago I commented on this subject. It does come up in my thoughts often (because I am a writer and tend to write male-oriented fiction).

Never heard of Jason Pinter before, but I read his article and was relieved to see that the chicken-egg question is not pondered by me alone. I've been wondering for years if the publishing industry doesn't concern itself with men because "men don't read fiction;" or if men don't read fiction because there's so little fiction produced anymore that appeals to men. I don't have data to prove either answer. This question occurred to me because of what I've seen (mostly on the demand side).

I used to be an avid fiction reader (thinking back, I had a lot more non-fiction in my library than any of my girlfriends, but my favorite books are mostly novels). Like Pinter said, my father was a reader, my brothers, cousins and a lot of my peers. Up until the early or mid-'90s, there seemed to be plentiful fiction on the shelves that appealed to me (and other men). Something happened and that changed. Since that time, I've bought almost no new novels. Now and then I peruse a bookstore just because, and I almost always come out feeling I've wasted my time. Even the jacket blurbs fail to hold my interest and after 4-5 of them, they all sound the same to me. I went from reading about 20-30 books a year pre-1990, to reading maybe 3-5 annually. Part of that, honestly, is due to my schedule. But the books I do read, I either borrow from the library, buy at used book stores, or are mid-list stuff--older books being reprinted. Oh, or I re-read stuff I already own.

So I'm one of those guys who looks back on the "glory days" of recreational reading, but who feels a little alienated now. More importantly from a publishing standpoint, I'm not buying or reading very much at all.

I'm not a complete neanderthal--one of the most powerful, treasured books in my library is Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. OK, that's non-fiction but give me some credit for not giving up when there was still no intergallactic invasion by page 50. ;-)

Anyway, thanks to all who posted links. I found it all interesting.

[Skip O'Neal]

Interesting. What age were you in 1990? Many people I know who were avid readers in their youth and young adulthood found for-pleasure reading one of the first things to go once their professional lives and family situations grew more complicated and pressing.

I could be wrong about this, but one reason I have a problem with Pinter's supply-side logic is that any bookstore carries decades worth of literature, so the issue of their not being enough on the shelves "for men" seems specious to me, though I may well be wrong of course.