Sunday Salon - do female writers get the short end of the stick?

Apologies to those of you who have read versions of this discussion on other blogs or have followed a similar debate in the newspapers - this will likely be a watered-down re-hash of the arguments made in those forums. In which case, why am I choosing to raise the subject as a Sunday Salon topic?

I mentioned a week or so ago that I had noticed recently that my list of favourite writers was significantly skewed towards the male end of the spectrum. As a female writer myself, this worries me, especially because there is no easy answer as to why this should be the case.

Recent research, though, has shown that I am not alone in my gender bias. Although women buy the majority of novels, and whilst approximately the same number of men and women are published each year, it seems that women are vastly underrepresented in award-wins and reviews.

Here are some statistics, gathered by Bookseller & Publisher in 2012 and published that year in Crikey, which demonstrate a decided gender bias towards male authors having their books reviewed in influential newspapers, magazines and literary journals. In Australia, 70% of the authors reviewed in the Weekend Australian in 2011 were male, and of the authors reviewed in the now defunct Australian Literary Review in 2011, 81% were male. In the same year, The London Review of Books reviewed 504 males to only 117 female writers, whilst The New York Review of Books reviewed 627 men to only 143 women.

This pattern stands for other years, too. And those numbers should shock all of us.

From a personal perspective, it makes me wonder whether I am more inclined towards male writers because I read more of them, or because I read more about them in the literary pages. I don't think the former is true. I tend to read a fair spectrum of literature including relatively equal numbers of male and female writers. But it is certainly true that I am probably influenced by reviews I read, and if it were the case that, say, The Guardian online over-represented male writers in its positive reviews, that might subconsciously influence my preferences. And of course most of us are probably influenced to some extent by the short-lists of writers chosen for annual literary prizes. When writers receive such prestigious public accolades it is hardly surprising that the rest of us therefore assume their literary worth must be higher than that of other writers.

But none of this explains why prizes are awarded more often to male writers, or why male writers are more frequently reviewed. The statistics are particularly puzzling given that women make up the majority of the readers, unless it is also true that more men than women sit on the judging panels of literary prizes, and more men than women write the reviews. I have yet to see those numbers.

My guess is that all of this comes back to the invisible standards that still form the backbone of our society, much as we like to pretend things have changed. As a whole, society still elevates certain subject matters above others, and art that concerns itself with the preferred subject matters is considered to be 'high-brow'. Broadly speaking, these subject matters are what we might also call 'public' issues, and they include politics, war, philosophy, religion, sport, education. In contrast, art that concerns itself with the private sphere is classified as low-brow, or 'popular'. The subject matters that fall under the rubric of the private sphere include romance, sex, sexuality, childbirth and child-rearing, relationships. Laundry. Traditionally,  the private sphere is seen as a female space, whilst the public sphere is assumed to be inhabited largely by men.

When was the last time you can remember a romance novel winning one of the major literary prizes?

Tara Moss, who has written eloquently on this subject, quotes Dr. Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former editor of Australian Book Review and a former member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, as saying: ‘Most of the unconscious bias I have seen in the literary world, and I have seen a great deal, has been to do with the male-centered values of a dominant culture whose values most people wrongly think are universal and gender-neutral.’

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that literary prizes are still generally handed out to writers who deal eloquently with traditionally male-centred values, even if this is not a conscious bias by the judging panel, and that prominent reviews, in turn, are given to those books which critics believe may stand a chance of winning a prize.

The last two winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction were Jennifer Egan, for a disjointed novel on the abstract theme of time, and Paul Harding, for a novel about death and dying and time.

The last two winners of the Man Booker Prize were Hilary Mantel, for a novel about the political world of Thomas Cromwell, and Julian Barnes, for a story concerned with how our notion of selfhood changes over time.

The philosophical discussion of time is clearly a winning subject matter these days, ding ding ding! Take note, novelists! (And don't think it has escaped my notice that three out of four winning writers cited above are female...)

Of course, it is no longer the case (if it ever was) that the private sphere is female and the public is male, but the vestigal belief that these distinctions still exist appears to hover prominently in our subconscious. Jonathan Franzen deals with relationships and love and romance; but he does so in the context of political discourse, and in a voice that is less overtly emotional than the voice which dominates genre novels that are classified as 'romance'. Margaret Atwood also writes about relationships and love and romance, but she frequently does so (these days) in the context of philosophical discourse about the future. Both writers grapple with the intersection of private and public values, and I would argue that this is largely the case with most good writers. Certainly Egan, Harding, Mantel and Barnes all deal intimately with the minutiae of people's private lives at the same time as they tackle big picture philosophical and political themes. To assert that there was ever really a strict divide between the public and the private in art is to take a limited view of it; and to put any weight whatsoever on 'high-brow' versus 'low-brow' classifications is, these days, to miss out on a wealth of good reads.

Furthermore, there is no reason why a discussion about motherhood could not in and of itself also be considered inherently political. Or why men would or should be less interested, these days, in that discussion than they are in other political topics. The traditional roles and identifiers of men and women in society these days are themselves dissolving into one another.

But it is true, for example, that I read a book by Marian Keyes on holiday recently and it didn't occur to me to review it here. Why? Because I viewed it as indulgent holiday reading, something a bit lighter, a bit frivolous. How unfair to Keyes, who is in fact a very good writer. Although had I read a crime novel by a male writer I think my instinct would have been the same.

So what to do about all of this?

Inspired by recent discussions of this topic, some female bloggers have banded together to establish the 

Australian Women’s Writers Challenge.  I am too fickle with my reading to be able to stick to a geographically limited challenge such as this, unfortunately, but I am personally going to make a conscious effort to read a wider variety of female writers this year and to try to ensure that I assess them fairly alongside the male writers I read.

I promise to keep you updated as the year progresses, but in the meantime I would be interested in your views: DO female writers get the short end of the stick, or is all of this just a lot of hullabaloo about nothing?