Wednesday, February 19, 2014

You don't notice a gender bias in newspaper reviews if you don't read newspapers reviews.

The list of things that pass me by is a long one, it has after all taken me until the middle of February to see something suggesting that 2014 should be the year of reading women (and also writers of color... presumably if you combine the two you're doing extra well) and of redressing the gender bias in newspaper reviews. It was Sunday's episode of Radio 4's Open Book that alerted me to this whole debate - they were concentrating particularly on the gender bias of reviews (if you care to follow @sohowgenderedis on twitter you can get regular updates on the ratio of male to female writers reviewed in The Guardian). Open Book had a male journalist who had decided to read only female writers for 3 months (but found so many good books he went to 4) and Rachel Cooke who has a book to push and seemed mildly outraged that everyone who had reviewed it in the press had been female and that she herself was generally only paid to review books by other women. I expect it's already clear that I found it all a bit patronising.

Statistics make it clear enough that more books written by men are reviewed in the mainstream press and that more of those reviews are written by men. Efforts to redress that balance can hardly harm the careers of women writers generally, but statistics also show that more women buy books, and unless they're mostly for presents I guess that means reading them too - nobody was discussing sales figures of male v female writers which might have been interesting, nor did they look further than the broadsheets and the London Review of Books. I hadn't noticed the gender bias, probably because I seldom read the weekend papers these days (or the London Review of Books).

When times are hard newspapers are an easy expense to cut, so I cut them, now when I do look the weekend supplements are increasingly out of touch with any lifestyle I recognise and review sections which are only likely to cover 20 to 30 books don't feel like much of a loss. To be fair my reading tastes veer towards the classics and older fiction which are unlikely to pick up many column inches regardless of gender but this debate is still 20 years to late.

I find most of my book recommendations on blogs, if good reads didn't crash my poor old laptop I'd find more there, or on library thing, or via conversations on twitter, all of those recommendations come from people whose opinion I trust and respect. I know their tastes overlap enough with mine that if they love something I should at the least investigate it. With very little trouble I can search out dozens of different recommendations a day never mind a week and I have no trouble at all in finding women writing about women, or for that matter men writing about female authors (men moreover who don't sound as if they think they're doing anything remarkable when they read books written by women).

Yes, it's depressing that women are under represented in review sections, but I doubt I'm alone in finding those same sections increasingly irrelevant. A better gender balance isn't going to make me spend money on newspapers that I could be spending on books, and I, like many women, am spending plenty of money on books (maybe men need the extra encouragement of that bias in their favour?). It's fantastic to celebrate women writers but something about this debate feels off to me, isn't it better to celebrate books that we're passionate about, to shout about them and push them through any channel we find, rather than to count and keep score over who's reviewing what? Is a review really more relevant because somebody's been paid to write it?  

10 comments:

  1. I recently saw this article, which relates to your post:
    http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/01/13/140113fa_fact_mead?currentPage=all
    Hope the link works for you.
    The other thing about 'paid' reviews is that they are so focused on the newest thing, whereas I read bloggers who write about books from many other time periods. I have learned more from bloggers about books than I ever did in book magazines or newspaper reviews. And often they are better written and easier to understand.

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    1. It's an important issue but I think there are others around it which need addressing as well. The first thing that gets me is how few newspaper reviews there are compared to blog posts and the like, the second - as you point out is that the same few books get all the attention (and I think this is true of books by men and women) and also one issue with paid reviews is that the people being paid inhabit the same small communities as the people writing the books and that surely creates all sorts of other biases. Thanks for the link, it worked perfectly and is an interesting read :)

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  2. I have subscribed to the LRB for a long time now, but the politics is really killing my enjoyment of it. Also the personal notices aren't half as amusing as they used to be. (That's my grumpy old woman rant for the day!) However, until it was pointed out somewhere (twitter?), the male bias had entirely passed me by. I suspect the print media just isn't as relevant to my reading experience as it was ten years ago, thanks to all those other sources you mention.

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    1. 10, 20, or 30 years ago the print media was all I looked at, at that would have been the time to count reviews and make a fuss (someone surely did?) now it feels increasingly irrelevant for any number of reasons. I still look at book reviews in newspapers when I come across them but find they're not often for books which appeal to me (Slightly Foxed is my preferred print review vehicle, but they don't deal with new releases and are full of books I do want to find). To be fair if it wasn't for the papers I would never read anything about the big releases from male writers...

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  3. My reading and blogging life is so full of female authors and bloggers and friends, that I am always a little surprised when I pay attention to the fact that men still dominate publishing.

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    1. Me too Thomas, and as it seems women dominate sales you have to wonder what the real picture actually is.

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  4. Going off at a bit of a tangent, I'm with you in having given up on the newspaper habit. I remember in my teens getting two or even three Sunday broadsheets.

    Now I'm 43, pick one up maybe every couple of months, and end up unsatisfied. I would rather get a nice second-hand Penguin for the price of the Times and Telegraph - the book will give far more pleasure.

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    1. A daily broadsheet and weekend papers would set me back about £12 - £15 a week, my partner and I are Guardian and Telegraph readers respectively, between us that's almost £1500 that's being better spent. I find I'm both cash and time poor these days so newspapers are a sacrifice that don't take much thinking about. A nice second hand penguin on the other hand...

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  5. I only get a newspaper on Saturday now when I pop into Waitrose and can get a free copy of the Guardian which has the most books coverage by far. Funnily, I do tend to read more male authors - but it's not intentional.

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  6. When I get my papers now it's from the same source, I have had 3 this week, 2 of which are sitting unread because I simply haven't found the time to have a look through them. I did manage the review section yesterday though. I read mostly female authors simply because those are the books I'm drawn too, sometimes I feel I should make more effort to read men, but when it comes down to it I read for pleasure, not for quotas, and don't feel inclined to change that.

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