Impact of Gender in Publishing Success

Source: Wikipedia

Dana Weinberg and Adam Kapelner published their peer-reviewed study "Comparing gender discrimination and inequality in indie and traditional publishing" in April, 2018.  Shockingly, their results show that gender equality between men and women authors in price points of books, percentage of authors published, etc., remains vast in traditional publishing--even bigger than the current pay gap in the general work environment.  Indie publishing still has a built in advantage for male authors over female authors but the playing field is slightly more equitable than in traditional publishing. 

 Using data from 2002 to 2012 from Books in Print, researchers discovered that books by female authors were priced 45% below that of  male authors.  Books by authors with discernibly female names receive somewhat less investment by publishers.  "Relative to their overall representation in the catalog, titles by female authors are overrepresented among the largest publishers, namely the Big Five and other Large Publishers, and also among Audiobook Publishers. They are underrepresented relative to male authors among Academic and University Presses, Institutional Publishers, and other Traditional Publishers."

When examined by genre, the results are even more dramatic.  Comics, humor, history, and business books published are overwhelmingly written by men.  Male authors outnumber women authors by 2:1 in subjects such as antiques and collectables, biographies and autobiographies,  bibles, business, and computers.   Women authors significantly outnumber men in non-fiction areas such as crafts, and cooking.

In fiction, male authors dominate the genres of action and adventure, crime, legal, literary, science fiction.  Women dominate in the genres of romance, christian, erotica, christian, and contemporary women.   In fact, there tend to be significantly more male authors in the remaining genres. 

Of course what we don't know are how many women (or men) are writing under names of a different gender.  Note the researchers eliminated authors with gender neutral names.  Nor do we know what percentage of women submit works of science fiction and what are acceptance rates within each genre.  Nor do we know if there are differing investments by publishing houses in  such areas as editing services, publicity, etc.

Certainly an author may want to consider using a gender neutral name when submitting manuscripts for consideration in certain genres.  I have decided to use my initials when submitting works.  I also have to applaud the editors of on-line publications who ask for blind submissions so that gender or ethnic bias cannot impact the selection process.


You can read the entire article via the link below:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0195298