A trend has emerged in recent years which centres on a worry that male authors are being decreasingly published and read, whilst women have begun to dominate the industry. This trend links closely with the controversial intention of Jude Cook to launch Conduit Books, which would aim, at least initially, to publish solely books written by men. This trend, in calling itself “the death of the male novelist”, perhaps exaggerates the situation at hand by implying the total loss of male authors. How much truth is there to this trend?
In reality, the situation is not so dire as that. When looking closer, it turns out that almost every article written on this topic refers to a single study completed by Joel Waldfogel, an economist, in 2025. Whilst a comprehensive, 42-page study, it does not take a genius to know that, for a reliable conclusion to be drawn, ideally, more than one source of proof should be drawn on. In addition, the World Economic Forum reports that “Waldfogel determined female and male authorship by first name, which risked misclassifying some authors”. It is notable, too, that while many articles cite Waldfogel’s study as proof that women so harshly outnumber men in the publishing industry, they never appear to give actual statistics, and this is telling when looking at the results yielded from his study.
He breaks book sales down by sector, and compares the percentage of books authored by women in that sector to the number of sales of the same books. In only two sectors do women outperform men in terms of authorship: romance, where women produce 78.3% of the work, and “Cookbooks, Food & Wine”, where women produce 51.4%. The latter is close enough to half that the split is essentially even, meaning that there is only one sector in which women author a significantly increased number of books compared to men.
The belief that women take up more space in society than they actually do is an idea that has risen in recent decades, perhaps due to the increasingly visible presence of the feminist movement. Some may see this as a threat to the current state of society and lash out against women’s representation in every sector. Despite this, women’s texts produce over half of the sales in ten of the 41 total categories. Perhaps, then, the answer lies not in the authors themselves but in the publishers and purchasers of books.
Although there is a more equal weighting between male and female authors than is often assumed, many statistics make it clear that women comprise the majority of both publishing staff and readers. In 2019, women made up 78% of publishing staff (although this number drops in more senior roles) and, in 2024, 65% of women read fiction compared to 35% of men. Perhaps it makes sense that more published texts are by women, given that it is a female-dominated industry in the sense of both the workers and the consumers.
However, it is easy to pick holes in this argument. For one, it has been shown that, whilst women read books equally by men and women, men tend to read books written by men. If the majority of readers are women, and women tend to read books by men and women equally, then the fact that there is an approximately equal number is a good reflection of the population’s reading habits.
There is also something to be said for the importance of men’s representation within texts. Perhaps the sales of texts by women are elevated despite not making up a ridiculous proportion of the total because men are lacking in healthy representation within texts. Although diversity is important within reading, it is also important for everyone to read texts which represent their own situation, to feel seen. Men are able to find far more representation in past texts than women are, but this cannot be used as a blanket statement. Identity is intersectional, and men who are part of marginalised groups would be hard-pressed to find literature that represents them. Even people who would find their demographic in the old-fashioned canon would likely not feel represented by it: a man living in the 21st century would likely not relate to the experiences of men in a Dickens novel, for example.
Men’s representation in modern novels is important, but there is some doubt as to whether this representation is waning. Although it is taken as such, Waldfogel’s study does not seem to imply the death of the male novelist, and neither does some research into winners of major literary prizes over the last half-century. The Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for example, both list their historical winners going back decades. These lists reveal that perhaps it is not so new a concept that women and men be on equal grounds regarding publishing and literary prizes.
In 1970, three men and three women were on the shortlist for the Booker Prize, and Bernice Rubens, a woman, won the prize. There are plenty of other examples of women being nominated with more equal weighting to men than is often assumed throughout the histories of these prizes, in similar ratios to those seen today. Whilst men have often dominated nominations, perhaps the extent to which they have done so is less than is often assumed.
Perhaps changes to the publishing industry are not borne of genuinely overwhelming shifts in gender splits, but instead in the eye of the beholder. In recent years, feminism as a movement has become increasingly vocal and proud in the Western world. Women have been present in the publishing industry and in literary prize lists for decades, yet it is only now that feminism – in particular, the visibility of women in the arts sector – is making its voice increasingly heard that society has begun to worry that the male novelist is a dying species.
This is not an isolated situation, and is mirrored in other areas of society. People are afraid of the increasing gender quotas which aim to make gender divides within companies narrower. The FTSE Women Leaders Review shows that women are still underrepresented within companies at 43%, yet fears abound about whether gender quotas are damaging the quality of the workplace. The anxiety that women are gaining power within the world is not specific to books, and has risen along with the visibility of feminism in the last few decades.
Perhaps people have an issue not with women’s fiction being published in large quantities, but more with the way it cyclically supports and is supported by the vocality and power of the feminist movement. This backlash against progressive movements has always existed, and often involves strong responses to a fear of forward movement within society. The idea that male novelists are a dying breed is not founded in truth, but in anxiety over women gaining equal voices to men. The death of the male novelist as a concept exaggerated by the dramaticisms of its name, which fails to stand up under investigation.
