Why would/does anyone want a specific gender to dominate anything, why instead wouldn’t you want it to be dominated by whoever is the best-fit people/persons in the world at the time? ‘Dominated’, oh dear, aggressive language creeping In again to media description. Shock.
This is why I stopped listening to NPR a couple of years ago. They are now as biased and sexist and racist as any on the planet while pretending they are being fair and balanced.
I don't think the article is suggesting one gender should dominate.
It is possible that on average one or the other gender will be better at a particular craft. For historic reasons we don't necessarily know where those natural abilities fall. And obviously the average is not a good predictor of how well a particular individuals will do.
They don't need to, because white men dominate most industries. There's little to be learned from examining any particular one of them.
If white men were to come to dominate a field previously dominated by some other group, that would be interesting. NPR could (and perhaps already did) write an article on how programming went from being female-dominated to male-dominated.
Why did you choose here to throw in a totally unnecessary little anti-trans side-eye? Like, you could just have chosen not to do that, and avoided ruining this discussion.
I don't think op was anti trans, rather than pointing out something that affects statistics. Real world example - I have a friend who writes smut under female pen name and identifies as woman on his social networks and towards the publishers because he realized his sales got 10x once he used female name.
I wish all my readers would be as generous a reader as you are! That is a very interesting angle indeed, and if it is what the grandparent comment intended, I misunderstood.
I thought it was more like a self reporting thing be a measured. Having a survey with self reporting is probably less accurate than just using someone’s HR record. Although I think the accuracy gain would be from having greater completeness due to less non-reporting than any discrepancy between birth sex and gender.
I don’t think anyone quoting the single word “identified” is intending to make a quite possibly interesting or nuanced point about their experience of the industry, no.
If you have an interesting point to raise, or a constructive question or criticism to make, as a good-faith commenter you should do so. If you choose not to, I think it’s fair to assume you’re not acting in good faith.
Everyone should have equal rights. The only thing getting destroyed is the social acceptability of intolerance. It used to be socially acceptable, but it is no longer so.
You should ignore the title, the article itself is substantial. These sort of takes are why they use such inflammatory headlines to begin with. It is a good question - why are there so many writers who are women compared to other creative professions?
To me, the obvious answer is women read much more than men nowadays, so it's unsurprising more women also enter into the book business. The article is searching for some sort of conflict between the sexes, but provides nothing substantial to support one.
> The demand for books in the US is also disproportionately driven by women. Surveys over at least the last couple decades have consistently found that American women are more likely to read books than American men, especially when it comes to fiction.
It's in the article, with citations. I just accepted that as a given, from my own anecdotal experience.
That does not mean that women read “much more” than men. In the cited articles the difference is less than 10 percent. That wouldn’t explain the discrepancy in publishing.
Not to much that what’s being measured specifically are fiction novels.
Regardless of the answer there’s clearly enough for an article here.
Women account for 80% of fiction sales in the US, UK, and Canada [0].
The stats mentioned show that women are more likely to read at least one book by 5% margin, but they buy many more books. The sales show how much more they buy.
I think this is a basic template for many npr stories. Name a group and discuss the group's progress or setbacks in an industry over the decades. Discuss in relation to racism and sexism.
The story is easy to research and get quotes on while listeners who donate typically enjoy the story. At the very least it also annoys some people as well, which drives more discussion.
>Then, around 1970, female authorship really began to explode. "There was a sea change after 1970," Waldfogel says.
That's exactly when Harlequin expanded into the US, causing the entire bodice-ripper paperback market to explode worldwide. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_novel#Rise_of_the_cate...> I don't mean to say that the entirety of the jump is from romance, but the massive growth of that genre definitely contributed. Then, of course, YA fiction; Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Twilight, and the many, many, many women authors they inspired.
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