A core remit for us here at the Women’s Prize Trust, is to champion brilliant books by women and to address gender bias in the world of books. New research we have commissioned has demonstrated that our mission is just as relevant in 2024 as is was at the birth of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
This research confirms that while women read books by women and men equally, men overwhelmingly reject books written by women in favour of male authors. Newly-analysed data drawn from Nielsen BookData’s consumer research, collected from a significant sample size of almost 54,000 book purchases in 2023, is published today ahead of the winner announcements for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction on 13 June. Both prizes aim to address gender bias by promoting exceptional writing by women to as wide a range of readers as possible.
This new analysis shows that for the top 20 bestselling female writers of fiction and non-fiction purchased in the UK in 2023 (which includes Agatha Christie, Harper Lee, Colleen Hoover, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Lisa Jewell and the non-fiction author Rhonda Byrne), fewer than 20% of purchases were made by men, with the majority of these focused on the classics as opposed to works by contemporary writers. In comparison, 44% of the top 20 bestselling male writers of fiction and non-fiction (including George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Stephen King and James Patterson, as well as Prince Harry, Robert Kiyosaki and James Clear) were bought by women. Just one of the top 20 bestselling female writers of fiction and non-fiction in 2023 was purchased mainly by men – Harper Lee – whereas seven of the top 20 bestselling male writers of fiction and non-fiction in 2023 were purchased mainly by women: Richard Osman, James Patterson, Prince Harry, James Clear, Matt Haig, Peter James and Harlan Coben.
Motivated to improve this gender bias, and to encourage more men to buy, borrow and read novels written by women, we have been running an ongoing campaign, ‘Men Reading Women’. In 2022, male thinkers and celebrities – from Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Andrew Marr, to Sanjeev Bhaskar, Simon Mayo and Lee Child – selected their favourite female writer, culminating in a public poll which generated 20,000 votes in one week.
In 2023, we published new research which revealed a growing pay gap between male and female non-fiction authors, and a comparative lack of visibility for female non-fiction writers in the media and book prizes. This campaign, which was one of the motivating factors for the launch of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024, also resulted in a significant increase in male donors year-on-year. Amongst these supporters, Jason Bartholomew, CEO of Midas, personally donated a significant one-off payment to the Trust to enable the launch of the non-fiction prize. The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction is also supported by sponsorship from Findmypast and the Charlotte Aitken Foundation. Further funding – and a second commercial sponsor – is actively being sought for the future.
