Why do so few men read books by women?
The byline at the top of this piece reads MA Sieghart, not Mary Ann. Because I really want men to read it too. Female authors through the centuries, from the Bront sisters to George Eliot to JK Rowling, have felt obliged to disguise their gender to persuade boys and men to read their books. The sad answer is yes. For my book The Authority Gap, which looks at why women are still taken less seriously than men, I commissioned Nielsen Book Research to find out exactly who was reading what. I wanted to know whether female authors were not just deemed less authoritative than men, but whether they were being read by men in the first place. And the results confirmed my suspicion that men were disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman. For the top 10 bestselling female authors (who include Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood, as well as Danielle Steel and Jojo Moyes), only 19% of their readers are men and 81%, women. But for the top 10 bestselling male authors (who include Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, as well as Lee Child and Stephen King), the split is much more even: 55% men and 45% women. In other words, women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women. And the female author in the top 10 who had the biggest male readership  the thriller writer LJ Ross  uses her initials, so its possible the guys thought she was one of them. Margaret Atwood, a writer who should be on the bookshelves of anyone who cares about literary fiction, has a readership that is only 21% male. Male fellow Booker prize winners Julian Barnes and Yann Martel have nearly twice as many (39% and 40%). Its not as if women are less good at writing literary fiction. All five of the top five bestselling literary novels in 2017 were by women, and nine of the top 10. And its not as if men dont enjoy reading books by women when they do open them; in fact, they marginally prefer them. The average rating men give to books by women on Goodreads is 3.9 out of 5; for books by men, its 3.8. The average rating men give to books by women on Goodreads is 3.9 out of 5; for books by men, its 3.8  Turning to nonfiction, which is read by slightly more men than women, the pattern is similar, though not quite so striking. Men still read male authors much more than female ones, but the discrepancy isnt so large because women tend to do the same in favour of female authors. But there is still quite a difference. Women are 65% more likely to read a nonfiction book by the opposite sex than men are. All this suggests that men, consciously or unconsciously, dont accord female authors as much authority as male ones. Or they make the lazy assumption that womens books arent for them without trying them out to see whether this is true. For a start, it narrows mens experiences of the world. Ive known this for a very long time, that men just arent interested in reading our literature, the Booker prize-winning novelist Bernardine Evaristo told me in an interview for The Authority Gap. Our literature is one of the ways in which we explore narrative, we explore our ideas, we develop our intellect, our imagination. If were writing womens stories, were talking about the experiences of women. We also talk about male experiences from a female perspective. And so if theyre not interested in that, I think that its very damning and its extremely worrying.  If men dont read books by and about women, they will fail to understand our psyches and our lived experience. They will continue to see the world through an almost entirely male lens, with the male experience as the default. And this narrow focus will affect our relationships with them, as colleagues, as friends and as partners. But it also impoverishes female writers, whose work is seen as niche rather than mainstream if it is consumed mainly by other women. They will earn less respect, less status and less money. The novelist Kamila Shamsie has sat on a number of prize judging panels and has witnessed exactly this asymmetry. The women judges are putting forward books by both men and women, she told me. And the male judges are largely putting forward books by other men.  Breaking down the bookshelf bias  Mary Ann Sieghart. Photograph: PR  Dolly Alderton is a highly successful writer, whose memoir Everything I Know about Love won the 2018 National Book Award for best autobiography. Yet in Britain, at least, it had almost no interest from men. Every newspaper and magazine journalist sent to interview her was a woman and it was, as she told me, marketed and perceived and received as something incredibly niche by dint of my gender. Yet a female experience is not a niche experience; its a universal common interest.  Yet, when she went on a publicity tour to Denmark, it was quite different. She told the male journalist who had been sent to interview her that he was the first ever. He couldnt believe how weird that was. He was in his 20s and said he and his friends read memoirs or fiction by women just as much as those by men. Things can be different. And its a very easy problem for men to fix. All they have to do is actively seek out books by female authors. If men are sceptical that women will write about subjects that interest them, they could try Pat Barker on the first world war or Hilary Mantel on the machinations of Henry VIIIs court. Once they become used to it, they may even find that these turn into human stories rather than niche female ones  and that they enjoy them. Men can gain a huge amount from broadening their minds and their tastes. Just because a book is written by a woman or is about women doesnt mean it has nothing to offer them. It opens their eyes to what its like to live as a woman in the world, the first step to learning empathy. And it may help to burst the bubble many men have been inadvertently living in, allowing new thoughts and insights to germinate.