Men overwhelmingly reject books written by women in favour of male authors, new research by the Women’s Prize Trust (WPT) suggests. The data drawn from Nielsen BookData’s consumer research, collected from a significant sample size of almost 54,000 book purchases in 2023, shows that while women buy books by women and men equally, men do the opposite.
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, the Women’s Prize Trust has been running an ongoing consumer campaign, ‘Men Reading Women’. In 2022, the charity engaged male thinkers and celebrities – from Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Andrew Marr, to Sanjeev Bhaskar, Simon Mayo and Lee Child – to select their favourite female writer, culminating in a public poll that generated 20,000 votes in one week. In 2023, the WPT called for reading groups to sign up new male members to shadow the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist.
