Study Finds Books by Women Are Priced 45% Lower on Average

A recent study that reviewed over 2 million books has found that books written by female authors are sold at an asking price almost half the cost of those written by men. The study was carried out by sociologist Dana Beth Weinberg and mathematician Adam Kapelner of Queens College-CUNY, and examined books published in North America from 2002 to 2012. The gender of each author was analysed with names and then cross-referenced with details on price, genre, and publication.

As The Guardian reports, it was found that books written by women and published by mainstream publications were, on average, priced 45% lower than books written by men. A paper published in PLOS One showed that there are more female writers in genres such as romance, a genre which is generally published at lower prices than male dominated genres such as science. However, even with these differences accounted for, it was discovered that authors with female names saw prices 9% lower than that of their male peers.

Weinberg revealed that the study was inspired by the the VIDA counts of book reviews, which have highlighted the bias to reviews of books by male writers, written by male reviewers. “Our study looked at all three types of discrimination – the gender segregation by book genre, the different value placed on these genres, and then finally the difference within the genres,” she said. “VIDA has been very good about calling attention to the first issue, namely the lack of representation of female authors in certain genres, and others have emphasised how books written predominantly by women and for women such as romance and women’s fiction do not receive the recognition they deserve.”

Weinberg added that it was unsurprising to see segregation between genres, particularly those deemed less valuable than others, but it was surprising to see how clear the discrimination is.

“We expected that taking account of the first two discrimination patterns would knock out any remaining differences in prices within genre,” said Weinberg, “but we were wrong about that. The within-genre price difference (9% for traditionally published titles) was extremely robust across various analyses. In retrospect, perhaps we should not have been surprised about this difference, since this pattern also mirrors the wage inequality within jobs that we see in the larger economy.”
The study also looked at books that had either been independently or self published over the same time frame and found that, when authors were able to price their books themselves, there was significantly more equality between genders, though still a gap of 7%.

“Without the publishers, we see slightly less discrimination, but it’s still apparent, and it follows the same patterns,” said Weinberg. “The easy answer [for the disparity] would be that publishing companies are sexist, but the indie findings challenge that simple explanation. The findings point to the strength of shared social contexts. Likely, publishers and authors share many of the same unconscious biases about what genre specialties are appropriate for male or female authors and about the value of those genres, and indie authors may also be mimicking what they see in the traditional publishing world. In addition, both traditional publishers and indie authors are creating and reacting to markets for their work, or to their perceptions of those markets, and placing and pricing their titles accordingly.”

Several notable writers have weighed in on the news. Costa-winning novelist Francesca Segal expressed her anger, saying: “I had no idea, but how exhausting, enervating and entirely predictable. It is the old news framed in a new way – women paid less for the same work,”

Samantha Shannon stated she was “disappointed by this statistic, but not surprised,” saying: “There is still an assumption that fiction by men has universal appeal and fiction by women does not, and I imagine this plays into the pay gap. There’s also the fact that women are often socialised to be agreeable, and perhaps feel less confident asking their agents to push for more from their publishers. I suspect the only way to fight this in the long term is for women to keep owning our identities in the industry, and to resist the understandable instinct to mask ourselves with pseudonyms.”