From the perspective of gender bias, specifically women’s voices, this year’s Man Booker Shortlist is far worse than usual. In terms of racial diversity, it’s pretty good: 4 authors of colour out of a total of 6, which is a big improvement on previous years. But women protagonists get short shrift.
I have shown in a previous post that bias against women’s voices accelerates between literary prize shortlists and winners. The clear bias against female protagonists, which is about the same between long- and shortlists, gets suddenly worse when the One Book to Rule Them All is chosen from among those shortlisted. The shortlists are bad enough: from 2000-2014 only about 36% of the protagonists of the shortlisted books for the Man Booker are women—and half of those are written by men.
This year, though, there are far fewer women’s voices on the shortlist than usual.1 In fact, it’s so bad that there are fewer protagonists in this year’s shortlisted novels (15.4%) than there are usually among the winners (16.6%).
This year, 2 of the 6 shortlisted books are written by women. Between them they wrote 6 protagonists, 5 of which are men.2 One male author writes about 1 woman (though he also writes about 3 men). So this year, of the 15.4% of protagonists who are female, a pitiful 7.7% are women written by women.
In terms of author diversity I’m very glad to see so many writers of colour on this list. I applaud diversity—I want literary prize lists to be diverse in every way. But almost all the books shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the books deemed important, interesting, and worthy of attention, are about men. Why do stories about women continue to be considered unworthy of prize consideration? Women’s voices are half the world. We must be heard.
1 The green represents Other, that is, non-human and so unclassifiable by gender. I frankly forgot to include it in the key.
2 Much of this counting and classification is a judgement call. We welcome discussion and correction.
Nicola Griffith 
When I reviewed The Moor’s Account (longlisted but not shortlisted) and interviewed the author, I didn’t ask her why she had not focused on a female perspective, since the story she was telling was based on a known individual from history. It seemed more important to applaud a woman author getting longlisted, and a black / Arabic perspective being written. Women characters are in her novel, and at least two have significant speaking and influencing roles, though they are not focalised as far as I can recall, and the novel doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. And yet, and yet. It’s hard to decide which aspect of a novel to call an author out on, when the fact that she got longlisted and is not a big name author was already REALLY good. I didn’t feel able to ask for the moon and stars on that occasion. I think each opportunity to highlight missed opportunities has its own merits, and we do the best we can at the time. Onward and upward.
I don’t blame the authors at all. The problem, I think, lies much further upstream with the notion of the universality of women or, rather, the lack of same. Women just aren’t considered interesting. We (women and men) write about well-known figures from history…and they tend to be men. They’re men because women weren’t considered important. It’s a vicious circle. We need to break it. By pointing out the numbers, over and over til everyone is sick of it, I can at least get readers to acknowledge the problem exists.
Perhaps this has already been done, but it would be interesting to examine those stats against those who are judging these awards. What is the majority gender of the judging panels?
Leona, that’s something we hope to get to but we haven’t, as yet. Are you interested in doing some of the judge-counting?
I could do that. How about I take a look and get back to you tomorrow?
Lovely!
The results are in…..
From 2000-2015, each year had 5 judges, except 2014 which had 6.
2015: 3 male judges, 2 female judges
2000-2014: average of 2.67 male judges, 2.4 female judges
Much closer than I thought it would be!
Leona, thanks for that. The gender split doesn’t surprise me. The problem–I think–is one of implicit cultural bias. It’s not nearly as simple as gender split of judges = gender split of awards. The bias begins way, way upstream.
Women live in an extraordinary world that men have a very hard time understanding—in fiction one of the main problems is that so much commercial fiction (and let’s face it, kids, all published fiction is commercial fiction because no publisher does NOT want to make money) is about action, about characters aggressing against each other. Female aggression is routinely denigrated. When women are killers, they are monsters. When men are killers, they are interesting, flawed characters. It is interesting to me that the world of gay men is being exposed much more in fiction than the deeper world of women—and often by women themselves who’d rather write about gay men than about women. I would love to see that situation changed. Perry Brass, author of The Manly Art of Seduction, and King of Angels, a gay, Southern, Jewish coming-of-age novel set in 1963, the year of J.F.K.’s murder.
@perry Well, I’m guessing the publishers (all over the world) of the Aud books would disagree with you. Though the ones in the UK might agree: no one there has ever been interested. “Oh, we already have one of those.” Whatever those means exactly…
Though, yes, I had a lot of reviewers of The Blue Place trying to understand why Aud was so violent. They didn’t understand she was just behaving like a human being, not a Girl. That gets old. Sigh.