Published: Jun 5, 2021 by Gavin
In 2018, I quietly set myself a challenge - to spend the whole year only reading books by women. I didn’t tell anyone else I was doing it until January 2019 (much to the chagrin of my wife). In that year, I read 17 books, all by women authors.
It’s now been over two years since I did this and I was curious to see if my reading habits have changed. Fortunately, I’ve been logging every book I read in GoodReads since 2014, so the data to answer this question exists. This isn’t a post to talk about the technical details of how I analysed the data, so let’s get to a graph.
Every book read since 2014, categorized by author's gender
This graph was incredibly striking when I first saw it. I had a suspicion when I chose to only read books by women in 2018 that women were under-represented in my reading habits, but I would not have guessed that they were this grossly under-represented. In the four years prior to embarking on this experiment, at best women only wrote 30% of the books I read in a year. In the worst year, it was a paltry 5%. The good news is that the situation has improved immensely in the time since. In 2019 and 2020, 65% of the books I read were by women. At this point in 2021, nearly 80% have been written by women.
The second most striking this about this is the drastic change between pre-2018 and post-2018. Since 2018, I have not necessarily been making a conscious effort to read more books by women, I’ve been reading books that look interesting. Clearly though, I have been picking up more books by women that look interesting. I think there are two main reasons for this:
- During 2018, I read far more books by new authors I hadn’t heard of than previously
- Since 2018, I have only read one book written before 2000 and only 7 written before 2010
Every book read since 2014, with date read on the x-axis and publication year on the y-axis
As seen here, in the past, I tended toward reading much older books, but more recently I’ve taken more of an interest in modern fiction. I do think that this has directly lead to an increase in the number of women authors I read because there are just so many more prominent women authors now, especially writing sci fi/fantasy, than there were in the 80s or 90s. As much as I’d like to take credit for being more aware as a consumer of literature, I do think that part of my own progress can be attributed to the progress the industry has made as a whole. Today, I get many of the books I read through the Hugo and Nebula Awards shortlists or things like the Tor.com newsletter, so the fact that these groups are featuring more women is absolutely having an impact on my own reading habits.