What in the world are men reading?

Last summer, I wrote a book proposal for a first-time author, who is a woman.

As part of the process, we had to do some research to figure out the ideal audience for her memoir, and that turned out to be predominantly women.

Amongst the many reasons for this was the fact that three in five Canadian women and four in five American women are avid readers. And this is particularly true for the genre and themes of my client’s book. Of course, there are male avid readers out there but all signs pointed to more women reading than men do.

An even more interesting finding was that women are more likely to read books regardless of the author’s gender but men are more likely to read books written by men.

Yes, you read that right: men are reluctant to open and read books written by women.

If you look at the readership of some of the greatest female authors, like Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Buchi Emecheta, and my personal favourite, Danielle Steel, you’ll find only one in five of their readers are male.

On the other hand, more than half of the people who read the likes of Charles Dickens, JRR Tolkien, Amos Tutuola, and Stephen King are male.

How absurd is that?

Unfortunately, most of the studies on this subject are not nuanced enough to truly articulate the reason for the supposed male lack of interest in female authors’ books. But I don’t doubt the validity of the numbers.

Test it for yourself: If you are not a man, ask a man this question: Who are the last 5 authors you read? — then, take note of the gender ratio in their response. If you are a man, ask yourself.

Although this issue has become more apparent over the last few years, it is not new. For decades, publishing experts have kept tabs on how increasingly challenging it is for female authors to market their books to a male audience.

It is one of several reasons some female authors made the business decision to publish their books under male pseudonyms e.g. J. K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith, Louise May Alcott as A. M. Barnard, and Nora Roberts as J.D. Robb, to name a few.

If established female authors have to put masculine-sounding names on their book covers, where does that leave young female writers who are looking to make a name for themselves as authors someday?

When you consider that most of the incredible, exciting, and forward-thinking books being published today are written by women—7 of the top 10 New York Times bestselling books in February 2024 were written by female authors—and that there are now more female authors than male authors in total, one can’t help but wonder what books men are reading.

I wondered.

My wondering led to inquiries which found that my fellow men enjoy reading genres like fantasy (e.g. Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien), dystopia (e.g. 1984 by George Orwell), science fiction (e.g. Dune by Frank Herbert), and biographies (e.g. Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins).

Who is more likely to write books in these genres? Yeah, clap for yourself, you guessed right: a male author.

And just in case you still needed more proof: male readers on Goodreads, a book review and recommendation website, voted for their best books ever. Only 21 books written by a woman showed up amongst the top 100 books on the list.

21 out of 100.

Recently, in a conversation with my wife, I was recalling some childhood events when it hit me: I was raised partly in a bookstore.

For much of my preteens, I spent time outside school hours on weekdays in a bookstore that my mother owned. After school, my brother and I would be driven to the bookstore, where we would hang out for hours on end, sometimes helping to stock books and other times, entertaining ourselves by striking up random conversations with book buyers.

When the energy wore off and I needed to simmer down, I would grab a book from the shelves and retreat to a corner of the store to read. And it was there, in that corner of the bookstore, all the way in the Southernmost region of Nigeria, that I began to see the world from the lenses of the men and women who dared to write about it.

Those authors helped shape my worldview. They painted a picture of a world I never knew existed, but the picture would not have been complete if it was skewed by gendered experiences.

If I assume that male readers, like me, grew up reading everyone, at what point did they/we become reluctant to read books written by women? And why?

Whatever the reason may be: if we, men, continue to read only men and see the world from the perspective of men alone, how will we understand the challenges and lived experiences of our female partners, mothers, sisters, and aunties?

How will we gain the emotional intelligence and maturity needed to have better relationships with women? How will we raise our daughters to be writers, or whatever professions they want to be, without worrying about their work being overlooked or ignored by the male proportion of their audience?

I’m convinced that our society will continue to be more close-minded, tasteless, and apathetic if more men continue to read only or mostly men. That’s certainly not the kind of society that any of us should want to live in.

In this second half of Women’s History Month, let’s do our part to close the gender gap in literature and on our bookshelves.

If you’re a man reading this, I’m challenging you to buy, open, and read a book—any book—written by a woman. When you are done, buy another one.

If you’re a woman, consider supporting a female author today by leaving her a review, raving about her book to your network, or buying her book for your male partner, father, brother, or nephew.

As for my client, whose book proposal I wrote last summer, she resisted the urge to use a male pseudonym as a publishing name and simply accepted the reality that, although her book’s message wasn’t solely for women, most of her readers would likely end up being women.

She deserves better.

If you read this letter and need a book recommendation, start here.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
— Joyce Carol Oates

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