It’s back to an old grievance today: WHY do books by men receive so much more attention than books by women? Or, for that matter, works of art, musical compositions and everything else? I walked down Cork Street in London this week , where the galleries featured exhibitions almost exclusively of work by men; I arrived home to find an enormous pile of book parcels -as a reviewer of crime fiction for the Literary Review I receive an average of 50 books a month and have space to mention about eight or nine of them. Given that at least one third of crime novels published are written by women, why are almost all the books I am sent by men? It is one of life's little mysteries or rather, if one is a woman who writes crime novels, one of life's bigger grievances!
It is so annoying, and hard, isn't it? I try to keep the gender balance equal-ish in the books I review. Last year I reviewed 128 books but only 49 of them were by women. (with one more by two women). I also had several DNFs (did not finish) last year, of which 10 were by men and 2 by women ;-).
ReplyDeleteHave you also noticed a trend for women authors to use initials more often than men, possibly in an attempt to avoid this bias? I'm currently reading a book by Y. A. Erskine who turns out to be called Yvette.