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03:21 pm
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A poll for the ladies on reading
Please only participate in this poll if you self-identify as having a female gender. I know it's hard to remember what-all you've read recently, but please try. UPDATE: for anthologies, please count them as the gender of the majority of the authors.
How many books can you specifically recall reading in the past two months?
Of those books from the last 2 months, how many were by men?
Do the math: roughly what percent of the books you read in the past 2 months were by men?
Mean: 56.76 Median: 55 Std. Dev 26.20
Who were the male authors?
If you read SF what sort do you read?
Adventure (SF or Fantasy)
2(6.1%)
hard science fiction
1(3.0%)
alternate history
0(0.0%)
paranormal romance
0(0.0%)
paranormal mystery
0(0.0%)
anything with robots
0(0.0%)
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| | For the year so far:
-34 books read
-23 by male authors
-9 by female authors
-1 anthology, heavily male but with some female authors
-1 story co-written by husband/wife And for 2008:
53 total books read
30 by male authors
22 by female authors
1 anthology, mixed-sex authors
For 2007:
52 total books read
29 by men
23 by women
For 2006:
51 total books read
23 by men
27 by women
1 book co-written by husband/wife
I know you didn't ask for this much data, but I was just interested in my own historical reading trends. :) 1st - please forgive my slight snark on the men post. I can be a bit pedantic when it comes to word usage.
2nd - I had a difficult time because I, too, have actually read about 12 or so books, but many of them are re-reads or non-scifi! I'm not sure why people are reluctant to include re-reads. I didn't ask for new books, just percentage of reading.
I also didn't ask people to limit poll answers to scifi. I am wondering in general if people's reading is gendered. Based on that, I'd re-poll if I could. I guess when I read your pool, it just seemed to subconsciously indicate new reads. I think, in general, I tend to read more male authors than female. Sometimes this is on purpose, because I specifically like quite a few male authors. Other times it tends to be because the genre I'm reading is heavily authored by males.
The only exception for me seems to be YA lit (which I read a lot of in order to find works for my students to read), which, at least in the subgenres I choose, tends to be about 50/50 male/female authoring. :) It's not so hard to remember if you use a site like LibraryThing.com to record every book you are reading. I started this in 2007, so I could have a list of potential Hugo nominees. But I read far more non-SF now than SF. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/43003555/700441) | | From: |  mrissa |
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| Date: | August 28th, 2009 08:50 pm (UTC) |
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My percentage of male authors went up after my grandfather's death and is likely to stay a little higher than my norm for awhile now: Grandpa did not read exclusively male authors, but he trended heavily that way, and I am mixing in books from his library with my usual fare. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/43142443/700441) | | From: | mrissa |
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| Date: | August 28th, 2009 08:51 pm (UTC) |
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Also, I seem to recall the men having tickyboxes for the last option instead of the radio buttons we got. This may explain differences in the response: people who would otherwise choose a subset will default to "anything good" if they can't say "x and y and also z." ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/27638673/967114) | | From: | dd_b |
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| Date: | August 28th, 2009 08:54 pm (UTC) |
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Yes, definitely checkboxes on the other poll. Good point.
I can't see the results here, though, since I haven't clicked "submit" on the poll. I forget, will doing that without checking anything mess up the statistics? If you click on the number of the poll, there's a link at the top that goes to View Poll Results. ya know, I just independently noticed the same thing. I am very much regretting that. unfortunately polls cannot be changed after they are posted and entries made on. I wonder if it makes sense to post a new poll...
![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/99678820/208448) | | From: | aiela |
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| Date: | August 28th, 2009 09:05 pm (UTC) |
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I can provide data all the way back to 2005, if you like.
I tend to get stuck on authors tho, so I'm not sure if this 2 month data is helpful. I read four books by Christopher Moore out of those 17 because I kept grabbing more from the library.
In looking at the last 2 montsh I can say that I tend to read more non-fiction by women than fiction, which is interesting.
(Actually, I just looked at the numbers for the whole year, and I'm at 23% women, 72% men, so I guess it was only a little off - I got 76% men for the last two months.)
Also, I counted Metatropolis as "men" since the majority of the contributors were men, not sure what the best way to do that was.
Edited at 2009-08-28 09:08 pm (UTC) | From: | stfg |
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| Date: | August 28th, 2009 09:41 pm (UTC) |
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I have read 8 new books in the last 2 months, 4 of which were men. For 2009 though, my percentage is more female with 20 female authors, 13 male authors, 1 anthology, and 1 book co-written by a man and a woman. I have not been tracking re-reads, but my feeling is that I am even more heavily female with those. I usually read a lot more books than just one in two months, but it's been a strange summer, and I only included the book that I both started and finished in that time. I wish I could specifically remember more books that I read, as I'm reasonably sure there are more.
To complete the last question since it wasn't ticky box:
Anything good (sf or f), adventure (sf or f), epic fantasy, non-epic fantasy, space opera, military sf, urban fantasy (there is a difference from paranormal romance, which I don't read much of anymore). ooo, urban fantasy. I knew I was missing some good ones. Thanks for elaborating. Oops, I listed all of the authors. Robin Goldsby is a woman. Are poll results editable?
It's kinda embarrassing to have only read 3 books in two months. My reading has really dropped off a lot the last few years. It is inversely proportional to how busy I am doing non-reading hobbies, which have grown quite a bit over the years. The past 2 months were sort of an anomaly-due to high stress I did a bunch of comfort rereading, so reread a bunch of stuff like the Rex Stouts and several David Eddings books which skewed the numbers. Normally, it's probably close to even. i have good data back to 2000 as i record my reading. let me know if you really need it. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/62574677/530846) | | From: | kreie |
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| Date: | September 1st, 2009 03:18 am (UTC) |
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Oddly enough, I don't feel like what I've been reading lately is representative of my normal reading habits. I'm usually more evenly split gender-wise (although still around 60/40 or 70/30), but during the summer I always go on a big post-apoc kick, and I always get more recommendations and tips for male authors. That in mind, however, two of the absolute best post-apoc books were by chicks. (I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.) |
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