I said I
would have a YA Crime Guest post this week – yeah, sorry, that post is coming
up next. Now I usually use this blog to
bang on about writing and process and my books and other people’s books, but
today I’m going to post about something else.
Because I also started this blog to share some opinions. And I read something the other day about
gender disparity in the New York Times Bestseller List, and I have an opinion
about it. So there you go.
Now if you’ve
been reading this blog’s past posts, you’ll know that a while ago I had a little chat about perceived notions of bias towards women in YA fiction – you
might wanna go read that before you read this.
I don’t want to rehash too much, but basically it came about because I
was asked ‘where are all the male YA
writers?’ during a panel (a panel I shared with Simmone Howell and Kirsten
Krauth).
I found the
question confusing, as I pretty much knew where they were (uh, at home writing
YA books?), but since then I’ve been asked the question again and again, and I’ve
also made a discovery. So now when
people ask ‘where are all the male YA
writers?’, I can answer with ease, because the answer is ‘they’re on the New York Times YA Bestseller
list’.
Yes, that’s
right. Recent number crunching in a post
by Kelly Jensen – a librarian, researcher and blogger in the US – on the blog Stacked has revealed that according to
the New York Times Bestseller list, male writers of YA actually out-sell female
writers by a fairly wide margin.
Although
there’s been some attention given to the NYT Bestseller list before (by Carey
Wilson, here, in 2012), Jensen has done a thorough analysis of the data from 47
weeks worth of NYT Bestseller lists for YA, starting from when they began a YA
list until 11/5/13. E-book sales are
included in the NYT YA lists, and placement depends on the highest sales within
a given week.
She noted a
number of kooky variables that seem to be particular to the NYT list, including
the time lag from sales reporting to list placement, and the way books in a
series are shifted over to a separate ‘series’ list once the third book is
released. She also took into account things like author teams (books written by
two authors in collaboration), how long individual authors remain on the list,
and whether YA is accurately defined. If
you’d like to read her original posts on the issue (which are fascinating), I strongly encourage you to go here, and then on to part 2, here.
What she
discovered was both startling, and curiously…not.
I honestly
cannot tell you whether the percentage of female YA writers is larger compared
to male YA writers in any given year – I don’t have that data, and Googling
doesn’t bring up any results. I suspect
I’d have to subscribe to BookScan and crunch the numbers, in the way Jensen
has, to come up with any genuine information (and it’s interesting that those
stats aren’t available – if you do have the stats, let me know!). Anecdotally,
female writers are considered to predominate in the field. And going by questions like the one I had,
about ‘where are all the male YA writers’
, it appears that this perceived gender imbalance towards female writers in YA
has become the ‘accepted’ understanding.
People genuinely believe that male writers struggle
to get a foothold in YA. This all feeds
into the ‘boy books vs girl books’ argument, the one that drives me so crazy –
the argument that girls will read anything, but that we need more books for
boys, written by men, to appeal to boys’ specialised tastes. Clearly there’s some idea floating around
that male writers of YA languish in a kind of literary ghetto.
But if you
look at the stats, a very different picture emerges.
In terms of
sales numbers, it’s actually male writers in YA who hold the top spots. Don’t believe me? Go look at the raw data. Jensen first examined the top 15 spots on the
NYT Bestseller list, to cast a wide net, and discovered that – on average – bestsellers were attributed to ten authors (noting that authors who appear more than once are only counted once). 7 of the authors were male and 3 of the authors were female.
In fact,
going by the available data, it appears that there has never been a time when individual female writers have outnumbered
individual male writers on the NYT YA Bestseller list. Ever. In the history of the list.
If you want
to see it for yourself, go have a look – here’s the current NYT YA Bestseller list. There’s currently six male
authors up there in the top ten right now, and their books hold eight spots in total.
Are you noticing a trend?
Jensen goes
into far greater detail in her analysis than I have here, of course. She looks at the average length of stay for
books on the list, and breaks down information about publishers represented. There are also other variables to consider,
including points raised in comments to the Stacked
article – some of the most relevant ones included questions regarding whether
some male YA authors already have a healthy readership in adult before moving
to YA, and whether gender imbalance in the adult market has trickled down to
the YA market; also whether adults buying YA (and that’s 55% of sales) have had
a major impact on sales figures.
Authors
themselves – if you follow Jensen’s links to the Twitter discussion – have
called the NYT list ‘quirky’, and questioned whether the list might have more
to do with prestige than with sales.
They asked whether the NYT list is a true reflection of actual buying
habits of YA readers.
But they also
raised a few issues that it would be well worth following up: namely, is the
path onto the NYT list different for the genders? What would now be an interesting discussion
is what the marketing budgets look like for male writers of YA compared to the
budgets of female writers. And how those
books are marketed as a product (returning to Maureen Johnson’s analysis of gendered cover trends). And, y’know, because life
isn’t busy enough, maybe we should check and see what the ratio is like for male/female
readers (or maybe more relevantly, male/female buyers).
What kind of
implications does an analysis of the NYT YA Bestseller list have? Well, I guess the most obvious implication is
that as a society, we still buy men’s writing more than we buy women’s
writing. And I mean ‘buy’ in both senses
– we spend our money on it, and we continually return to it as the norm, or
benchmark if you will, of quality writing.
Lots of
people will say ‘well, what does it matter what the New York Times list looks
like? JK Rowling sold millions - if
female writers’ books are selling well, then the list is obviously not a
reflection of trends, or even an accurate reflection of market share’.
But this is
disingenuous - as Jensen points out, it matters.
Because
publishers ostentatiously use the tag ‘#NYT Bestseller’ to plug their books.
Because some retailers
(eg big distributors like Target) won’t even pick up a title unless it has the
‘#NYT Bestseller’ label attached.
Because
writers themselves use the ‘#NYT Bestseller’ label as a draw for readers and
(particularly, adult) buyers.
And above
all, because the ‘#NYT Bestseller’ label has status – it has become
representative of what qualifies as a
good book, a book that we recommend to our friends, a book that we buy as a
Christmas present for a family member (see the Wikipedia article note that a Stanford Business School analysis found that the majority of book buyers use the NYT list for buying ideas), a book that we pick up ourselves to see
what is going on inside .
It’s also a very
visible ranking of sales, and
consequently a great way for people to make assumptions about what’s going on
in the world of literature. So if my
husband really wants to yank my chain, he can make a comment like ‘So does that
mean that male writers of YA are better than female writers of YA?’. He knows what happens when these jokes get
made (‘honey, I love you, now just walk
away’), but he’s also making a point: that these are the kind of value
judgements that are made by the larger community.
If the NYT
Bestseller list for YA is largely dominated by male writers, despite the preponderance
of female writers in the field, then obviously there’s underlying social trends
going on – well, d’uh. And if you couple
that with VIDA stats and coverflip issues and inequality in award lists (see
the Caldecott thing here) and so on, then you start to see a very glaring
picture of where women still stand in the literary field.
None of this
is new. None of this is unclear – saying
there’s no gender disparity in literature is right up there with climate change
scepticism, in my opinion. It’s a
no-brainer. Gender inequality in
literature is, after all, right on trend with gender inequality in all the
other areas of life – domestic life, work, government, policy, agency, opinion.
I guess for
me the question of literature is one of voice. Without women’s voices, women’s stories,
women’s expression, then half of the population goes silent and unheard - and
by extension, unseen, unvalued, ignored.
Sure, some female authors have made it onto the list – and some (Suzanne
Collins, Cassandra Clare, Stephenie Meyer, Virginia Roth, JK Rowling) have been hugely
successful. Perhaps this has blinded
people to the awareness that gender parity is still a long way off. Which, when you consider how much has been
made of the presence of female authors in YA, is a real kick in the pants.
So I guess
the question I have – the BIG question - is this.
Is it asking too much to think we
could have real societal change on gender inequality in my lifetime?
Wow, that’s a
big one. It’s only been about fifty years
since the emergence of Second Wave feminism.
My mother was still reading a completely male-dominated literary canon
in school; my own experience was only one step removed. I was one of the first women to go through
the officially-classified Women’s Studies major (now called Gender Studies) at
my university.
Am I
expecting too much to think that women should now have an equal slice of the
literary pie within barely one generation?
We have come from a very low base – in slow-moving political terms, fifty
years is not a lot, and the fact we’re discussing and questioning it so openly
is quite a big deal. At least we’re
talking about it – as Jensen points out, this isn’t a discussion that’s ‘begun’
but rather one that has been raging for some time. And here in Australia, where our discussions
on racism seem to have stalled to the point where we’re all now back somewhere
in the fifties, discussions about gender disparity are still strong and
ongoing.
But I’m
impatient. I want more than talk. I want something to happen.
I guess for
me, part of the impatience stems from having children of my own, who are now
readers. In some kind of hilarious
karmic smack-upside-the-head (for the woman who studied feminist literature and
philosophy) I have four sons. They are
my life, and they will grow up into amazing and vibrant young men, and I want
something for them.
I want my
sons to grow up reading books by men and books by women in equal amounts, to
value their stories equally. I want them
to be free of the ‘boy books vs girl books’ bullshit that restricts what is
considered appropriate for them to read.
I want them to see books by both women and men with covers that reflect
the human stories inside. I don’t want
them to grow up thinking that ‘mum just writes chick stories’. I want them to grow up believing that all
stories are human stories.
I don’t want
them to grow up thinking that half of the population is lesser.
So bear with
my naïve logic here. Bestseller lists
are about sales, right? Which means that
more people need to buy more books by more female authors, in order to generate
the sales that would create gender parity on the lists. Then we have a ‘quirky’ but nonetheless
visible indicator that we’re valuing female voices as much as we’re valuing
male voices.
If that’s the
case, then I thought I might try a little experiment. In 2014, I’m going to buy only books by
women.
I mean, why
not? Who could it hurt? Well, I might irritate a few people who think
I’m being self-serving, or just find my unsophisticated politics kind of annoying. I may well tick off a few of my male writer
friends - although I’d like to emphasise that the statement above doesn’t say
‘read’, it says ‘buy'. So I will continue
to read books by men – and I’ll promote them, and rec them to friends, and give
them to my kids, and review them positively whenever I can. I’m always happy to promote good books, and
great stories. Haven’t read The Fault in our Stars yet? – do yourself
a favour and read it! Love Scot
Gardner’s The Dead I Know? – go get a
copy! Hanging out for the next book by
Michael Adams, The Last Shot? – me
too! I’m definitely gonna put it on my
to-read list, and in 2015, I will go out and buy it.
But not next
year. Next year, what I’m going to spend my money on is books by women.
It should be
easy. Women writers already dominate my
reading list, and there are lots of female writers out there who don’t get the
acknowledgement (or sales) they deserve. This is just something I can do, on a small
(miniscule!) personal level. Not a
petition or a discussion – a backyard economic change. Just me.
One year, one person, one wallet.
It may not
count as a blip on the NYT Bestseller list.
But maybe - one day - we’ll see those equal stats line up.
