Looking back at the OP, I think that much of this discussion is missing the forest for the trees. So overdrive/cloud library appears to be pushing more female authors than male? There could be any number of reasons for that, though I suspect that paid promotion or simply responding to what is already being checked out at a high rare are the best bets.
But let's contrast that with publishers and reviewers. Why? Because books that get reviewed are the ones that get nominated for awards, get more press, and, you know, sell copies. If you aren't selling, then it doesn't matter if you are Stephanie Myers turning bad fanfiction into bad mainstream fiction or if you are Haruki Murakami.
VIDA, an advocacy group that compiles statistics on the hard count of the number of male vs. female authors that are reviewed in major publications, has been tracking these trends since 2014.
In 2014, they found:
Quote:
One of the worst culprits was found to be the London Review of Books which featured 527 male authors and critics on their pages in 2014, compared with just 151 women. It also saw a rare drop in reviews of books written by women from the year before, with 14 fewer than in 2013.
The New York Review of Books displayed a similar imbalance, featuring an overall 677 men to 242 women. The New York Times book review featured an overall 909 male contributors and authors, compared with 792 women; The Nation’s male-female split was 469 to 193; and at Harper’s fewer than half the authors reviewed were women.
|
This hasn't changed much, as their 2017 numbers report:
Quote:
Meanwhile, 5 of these major outlets had women representing between 40% and 49.9% of their total publication: Harper’s (42.1%), The New York Times Book Review (45.9%), The New Republic (42.2%), The Paris Review (42.7%), and Tin House (49.7%).
Unfortunately, the undeniable majority, 8 out of 15 publications, failed to publish enough women writers to make up even 40% of their publication’s run in 2017: Boston Review (37.8%), London Review of Books (26.9%), The New Yorker (39.7%), The Atlantic (36.5%), The Nation (36.5%), The Threepenny Review (32.7%), and The Times Literary Supplement (35.9%).
The New York Review of Books had the most pronounced gender disparity of 2017’s VIDA Count, with only 23.3% of published writers who are women. Previously, the London Review of Books had exhibited the worst gender disparity, at 21.9% in 2016, with comparable numbers in prior years (23% in 2015, 22% in 2014, 21% in 2013). In 2016, The New York Review of Books continued their pattern of apathy toward gender parity, with women as 24.7% of their contributors. They’ve historically exhibited lows of 21% (2015), 26% (2014), and 21% (2013).
|