When women win literary awards for fiction it’s usually for writing from a male perspective and/or about men. The more prestigious the award, the more likely the subject of the narrative will be male.
I analysed the last 15 years’ results for half a dozen book-length fiction awards: Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics’ Circle Award, Hugo Award, and Newbery Medal.1
At the top of the prestige ladder, for the Pulitzer Prize women wrote zero out of 15 prize-winning books wholly from the point of view 2 of a woman or girl. Zero. For the prize that recognises “the most distinguished fiction by an American author,” not a single book-length work from a woman’s perspective or about a woman was considered worthy. Women aren’t interesting, this result says. Women don’t count.
At the bottom of the prestige ladder—judging by the abundance of articles complaining that YA isn’t fit fare for grownups—for the Newbery Medal, awarded to “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children,” women wrote wholly from girls’ perspectives 5 times—and men wrote so 3 times. Girls, then, are interesting. Girls count.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, when it comes to literary prizes, the more prestigious, influential and financially remunerative the award, the less likely the winner is to write about grown women. Either this means that women writers are self-censoring, or those who judge literary worthiness find women frightening, distasteful, or boring. Certainly the results argue for women’s perspectives being considered uninteresting or unworthy. Women seem to have literary cooties.
The literary establishment doesn’t like books about women. Why? Is it connected to the Cartesian dualist mind/body divide in which women are viewed as very much on the body/bad side of the scale rather than the mind/good?
The answer matters. Women’s voices are not being heard. Women are more than half our culture, if half the adults in our culture have no voice, half the world’s experience is not being attended to, learnt from, or built upon. Humanity is only half what we could be.
Assuming the data say what I think they say, that women have literary cooties, why? And, more importantly, how do we get rid of them?
ETA: Read my follow-up post about some possible solutions to this mess.
ETA2: Here’s how you can help.
1
- These are awards that, in my opinion, influence the author’s subsequent book sales and/or career arcs. It’s subjective: I haven’t pulled together reliable data on book sales pre- and post-awards. (Though here are links to three articles which include cherry-picked numbers and anecdata on the National Book Award, the Man Booker, and the Hugo Award.)
- My method: collate the gender of the writer (I assumed that when reviews talked about an author as “she” or “he” that author identifies as female or male respectively) with that of their protagonist/s (whether in first or third person); sometimes based on my own reading of the book, more often on reviews.
- When the gender of the point-of-view character could be called arguable (Middlesex, Ancillary Justice) I’ve counted it as Unsure. Assign those how you like.
- The Pulitzer covers 16 years because one year there was No Award.
- 4 US, 1 UK, and 1 international English-speaking. 5 adult and 1 YA. 4 or 5 (depending who you talk to) ‘literary’ and 1 or 2 ‘genre’. The comparisons, therefore, are imperfect.
- I have no doubt I’ve made many mistakes. Feel free to offer corrections in the comments.
- Nothing would please me more than for others to check my numbers on these awards and/or to take a look at other awards using the same criteria.
2 In either first or third person. ETA: I counted Strout’s Olive Kitteridge as Both because at least part of it is from a man’s POV.
Might it be easier and more expeditious to apply pressure to all literary award presentation committees to seat an equal number of men and women on their panels? I mean the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be ratified by the number of states required to make it law forty-three years after Congress passed it. (Thank you, Dixie.) I think it might be past due time for a short-cut.
Patrick, it’s not about the judges. The problem lies farther upstream, I think.
Hello Nicola. From lovely cake to this! Thank you for the amazing work and analysis. Although we’re focused on something a lot less prestigious/visible than awards, this reflects the general situation which leads your books to be unique in more than your talent and voice: in character, topic and choice of milieu as well.
This is the Medium version – and it’s observational (I could easily graph what the topics are and featured writers are to back up what I say). https://medium.com/@ASterling/three-reasons-women-s-writing-and-expression-is-less-visible-than-men-s-e0e62b21d101
We will be doing a series of 4 posts crossposted with Book View Cafe and Medium next week about our writer market validation survey. This will deal only with what the writers surveyed would like/what they see some of their barriers as being, and with market information about who readers are, and who potential regular readers and bookbuyers are. I hope you will be interested to read some.
Amy, yes, I’d like to read more when it’s up.
Before going any further let me make it very clear that I agree there is an issue here, a problem that is reflected in markets around the world. However there is also a numbers issue that has an impact on awards.
This was a good piece and raised thought-provoking stuff but is the tip of a darn big iceberg.
While I was still an active independent reviewer, a couple of major publishers in particular were sending me pretty much everything, including plenty way outside of my area of interest. After discussing much the same issue several years ago, I started keeping track of author gender in all new releases being sent to me. That was a new step for me as I normally do not give a rats’ furry backside about the gender of an author – my interest is in the book and whether or not I am enjoying the read. However once I started taking notice of gender, the sheer volume of male authors was miles ahead of the number of female authors in new titles being sent to me. On a purely numerical approach, if there is a far, far greater number of male authors being published then the competition in awards is already greatly weighted towards males simply because of what is being published and a major gender disparity shall result. And in order to determine the degree of any undue gender bias in awards or any other publishing-related issue, this shall need to be analysed in respect of that existing disparity.
I believe this is part of a larger gender-in-publishing issue. The best way to get decision makers to start taking some remedial action where required is to figuratively smack them around the head with indisputable detailed and in-depth analysis. Being able to demonstrate any degree of bias outside of existing disparity is one example. I was an economic statistician before landing on the invalidity scrapheap so I felt I could at least make a real start on compiling the sort of data and analysis needed. And that’s where we immediately run into data problems. The most basic level of information that is going to be needed is detailed publishing data as things like anecdotal evidence simply won’t cut it for that sort of analysis. Short of manually identifying every single publisher in every country of interest and then manually investigating every single release by every one of those publishers is so big a job as to be simply not feasible. I tried doing it for the relatively small overall market here in Australia and even that proved unfeasible for a one-man show to be trying to do. Yet without that sort of analysis I cannot see anything changing.
Ross, we’re on the same page. If I were Empress of the Universe, publishers would automatically count mss. submitted to them: the data they would note would be about diversity, and gender (who wrote, who is the subject) would be a part of that.
From there we could then get percentages of those submissions that were acquired and published. Percentages of those published that were meaningfully supported. That were reviewed. Submitted for awards. Longlisted. Shortlisted. And so forth.
In a perfect world, we’d have data from every stage of the publishing cycle. That’s the only way to really get at the underlying issues–the chokepoints, if you like.
To do that, we need the willing participation of publishers. Until then, though, we’ll do what we can to draw meaningful attention to the things we have access to–enough attention, I hope, to persuade publishers that their participation would be cost-effective for them (as well as, y’know, being a Good Thing).
At the risk of sounding as naive as I actually am, how common is it for publishers to maintain reliable logs of incoming manuscripts? My sense of human nature tells me that the daily routine is often far more casual than that, and that the event horizons surrounding the black holes we call publishers smash a lot of manuscripts to their component smithereens, never to escape back into mundane space – deliberately or accidentally recycled, used for cat pan and bird cage liners, given over to pre-school artists, discovered years later under dust and paperbacks, and so on. But if even a few houses kept fairly competent logs, and if those lists could be matched with those same publishers’ actual catalogs, and if most of the authors could be sexed by their names, then all that would be better than, well, naught.
One thought: I really don’t know how these awards work, but I guess it would be (more?) useful to compare the pools / shortlists or something similar with the actual prizes’ data. I mean, if you would say “Writing about about old Hawaiian men does not bring you an award” it would be (more) obvious that part of the reason may be that there are few books about them. So my question is: is there data about e.g. top 1000 most popular fiction books in the last 15 years (based on sales or mentions in literature press etc.) or about the books that were submitted/recommended to those juries? Because it is possible that the real (and still not much more pleasant) reason may be that there are just too few books about women / girls (but the chance to win with a book about them may be a bit better than this data suggests).
chimie, that’s exactly the kind of data we need but don’t have. We don’t even know what percentage of fiction published every year is by a woman, never mind about a woman…
Paul, as far as I know, not common at all. In fact, I don’t know of any publisher that does it at all. Drives me crazy. There’s no data about anything useful… (Or that’s how it seems to me sometimes.)
Interesting article and comments. In my experience the bias is way farther upstream than even what is submitted to publishers. For a woman writer there’s also the temptation to take the easy way of writing romance. SF conventions seem to have a barrier between unpublished and published writers and the barrier is all the more acute for female writers. The editors don’t seem inclined to chat with us. Some panels are attended almost entirely by women and others almost entirely by men. Romance conference on the other hand are quite welcoming with the pros quite willing to mix with and give pointers to unpublished authors. These pointers are applicable to winning the a Rita award, not a Hugo. It’s easier to talk with editors and agents at Romance conferences. I wonder how many good women writers who’d like to write literary fiction or science fiction end up going into Romance and YA because these genres are more welcoming to women. This year we have the Hugo puppy controversy going on which seems to have been a move against women’s voices. I’m currently reading the nominees for best novel. Two women writers in the bunch and they follow the pattern of having no female protagonists. I often write parallel books with two or more books which are basically the same story but from a different perspective, sometimes male sometimes female. I look forward to comparing the reception of these books once I get them published. I’m going the self publishing route because I couldn’t find any publisher or agent who is a good match for my writing. I intend to persevere and expect you’ll be hearing of me in a few years. I’d be ecstatic to win the Tiptree award. I notice that it’s not included in the analysis Oh wow! I just checked to see that this is Nicola Griffiths blog. I’ve got Hild on the top of my to be read pile. I’ll read it after Ancillary Sword which I need to read for the Hugo voting.
Yep, Nicola Grifffith, that’s me (without the s).
I agree, the bias is upstream. But I’d love to get the data…