On Sexism and Awards (Updated)

If you’re a man and you write a realist YA novel you’re more likely to win an award for it than a woman is.

Big claim I know.

Here’s some evidence about the awards side of the equation, an examination of most of the big awards in the Young Adult genre since 2000, compiled by Lady Business.1 They looked at not only US awards but the big Australian, Canadian and New Zealand awards too.

Here’s where I’m going by my own experience, i.e., yes, it’s anecdotal evidence. I believe the majority of authors published by mainstream YA publishers are women. Despite some—admittedly slapdash googling—What? I’m on a deadline—I don’t have the numbers to back that up. If you do have them please let me know and I’ll amend this paragraph. But I am pretty confident in asserting that YA is one of the most women-dominated genres there is.2

Here’s why: I’ve been told by many organisers of YA conferences and conventions that they struggle to get enough male authors to take part. Every time I’m at one of those conferences there are way more women than men. When I look through catalogues and lists of forthcoming titles from publishers they seem to run around 75% female authors. Yes, that’s a guestimate.

So let’s say that more than 70% of YA is written by women that means men are way overrepresented when it comes to award time winning 42% of the time rather than the 30% which would line up with their actual representation.3

We women writers of YA talk about this. We speculate about why it keeps happening. One of the reasons I’ve heard is that the givers of these awards are largely heterosexual women and they have crushes on the male authors and thus are more inclined to reward them. I think that’s total bullshit. Worse, it’s sexist bullshit.

Here’s what I think is going on. You’ll have to bear with me because it’s complicated.

First of all, we live in a sexist, misogynist world. Alas, awards are not given in a special sexism-free bubble. We have been taught from an early age that men are more important than women. There have been a tonne of studies—and if I wasn’t on a deadline and aware that I shouldn’t be writing this right now I’d link to some of them—that show that both men and women listen to men more than to women, that we value men more. That’s the culture we live in.

This permeates how we learn to read. Think back to picture books and those early primers. Now they’ve gotten a bit better over the years. But I have a two-year-old niece and, frankly, I’m shocked at how sexist many of these books are. Women are still predominately shown as parents and housewives and nurses and teachers and, well, you get the picture.4 I have to hunt to find books with girls and women shown as active and powerful as boys and men. Those books are out there, but wow are they lost in a sea of boys are everything. It correlates closely to what Geena Davis’s institute has found about movies and TVs. The majority of talking animals are still male.5

From an early age we’re learning boys are more important and boys have adventures. Then when we start reading proper novels we learn over and over, up through high school and then into college/university, that books by men are considered to be better than books by women. Look at the reading lists for most high schools and universities. Pretty much anywhere in the English-speaking world.6 Boy book after boy book after boy book. Plus some Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.

We’ve been taught that good books, on the whole, are written by men and that good books, on the whole, are about men. Is it any wonder that we carry those unconscious views with us into our reading lives? Into our award-giving lives?

I’ve been on juried awards and I know many people who’ve been on juried awards. I guarantee you we are not going onto them deciding to give awards to men, deciding that women don’t deserve awards. Everyone on a jury wants to give the award to the best book. But unconsciously we’re valuing stories about boys, stories by men, more than those about girls or women. Even when we’re damned sure we’re not doing that. Yes, I have done this. Yes, it’s insidious.

But that is not the whole story.

There’s more to what stories are valued than who the protag is. Most romances are told from the point of a woman, but also of a man. That’s right in the majority of mainstream romances the man is telling fifty per cent of the story. Yet romance is rarely valued. Both fantasy and science fiction frequently have male protags. But they’re not valued highly either. That’s born out in these awards. Look through the winners of any YA award—other than the ones specifically for fantasy/science fiction/romance—the majority are realist. The majority of the nominees are too. In my cursory glance through I couldn’t find a single winner that could even at a stretch be called a romance and only a handful that fit the bill of being a crime novel.7

The only literary genre we are consistently taught to value during our formal education is realism i.e. Literature, which historically is a recent genre. Fantasy has been with us since we started telling stories. It’s by far the oldest kind of story we tell. But two centuries of realism dominating has left us consistently undervaluing fantasy and not considering it to be Literature.8

Learning to read is hard. I’m watching my niece take her first steps in letter recognition. She’s able to recognise her written name about half the time. It’s tough. But that’s just the beginning. We’re also taught how to read stories and novels. As I’ve noted, what we’re overwhelmingly taught to read, once we leave children’s books behind, is realism. So that’s what most of us are best at reading.

I’ve heard reports from frustrated genre loving friends on juried awards where the other jurors literally did not know how to read the fantasy, science fiction, romances etc. The non-genre reader jurors saw a book with a dragon in it and instantly decided it was derivative rubbish. Read a book where someone’s learning magic and said “Well, isn’t that just Harry Potter all over again?” They wondered why books were marred by “inserting” vampires/ghosts/werewolves/etc into the story.

They did not have the reading skills to recognise the ways in which this particular dragon book, and this particular learning magic book, this particular vampire/ghost/werewolf book was doing something that had never been done in that genre before because they’d never read that genre before. They had no idea. All these book read the same to them. Ditto with romance. They could not see how that particular romance was basically reinventing the genre because they’d never read a romance before.

Pity the poor genre-literate juror. They do not struggle to grapple with realism. They know how to read it. Everyone knows how to read it. But they have to sit and watch every single genre book be discounted simply because the other jurors don’t have the skills to read them. It’s mightily frustrating.

Romance, of course, cops it worst of all. Love stories are silly girls’ business. YA romances by women do not make it on to award shortlists. I suspect the publishers don’t even bother submitting them for awards. What’s the point? They’re discounted before they’re even read.9

There are other factors to do with reputation and who is perceived to write the same kinds of books over and over again and who isn’t. Not to mention how a woman writing a traumatic story from a girl’s point of view is perceived to not be stretching themselves as much as a man doing ditto.10 How funny books are not valued as much as serious books. Domestic stories are less important than stories about war and so on and so forth. How certain writing styles are closer to the styles of writing we were taught in university/college were good writing: no adverbs! “said” as the verb of utterance! Blah blah blah! Basically a funny, romantic, fantasy book by a woman has close to zero chance of winning an award.

There are, of course, many other things going on—I did say it was complicated, didn’t I?—but that’s all I’ve got time for now.

Disclaimer: I want to point out that I felt free to write this post as a woman who writes YA precisely because my books have not been overlooked. They’ve been shortlisted for and won awards. I have no sour grapes. I’ve been very lucky. If I didn’t feel that way I would not have written this.

I don’t believe anyone’s story is more important than anyone else’s. I don’t believe any genre is more valuable than any other genre.

Update 7 Oct 2015: An Australian study found that 66% of all writers are women and 90% of all children’s authors, which I’m assuming includes YA. I still haven’t found data for the USA but I doubt it would be too much different.

  1. I am so grateful to Lady Business for doing the heavy lifting and writing that smart, detailed report. You saved me from having no data to point to at all. Bless you! []
  2. Romance, obviously, being at the head of that list. []
  3. Though, you know what, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are even fewer YA novels written by male authors than that. I think I’m guessing high. []
  4. To be clear those are all hard jobs that should be paid and respected far more than they are. But they are stereotypically female jobs. []
  5. Total mystery as to how talking animals manage to reproduce. []
  6. I like to think that it’s better in non-English speaking countries. Don’t disabuse me of that notion. []
  7. Though I would argue overall that crime is probably the most valued of the so-called “genre” genres. I believe capital L Literature is also a genre. []
  8. For instance, retold fairy tales aren’t even eligible for the National Book Award in the USA. To which I say, WHAT NOW? But that would be a huge digression and this is already too long. I got a book to write. []
  9. Well, unless they’re written by men and are not described as romances or even as love stories. And, well, there are quite a few examples in YA, aren’t they? I’m not going to name them. []
  10. Same with a white writer writing a black protag as opposed to a black author writing a black protag. There are many other ways in which reader expectations mess with how they read books along the axes of race, class, sexuality etc. []

14 comments

  1. Ana @ things mean a lot on #

    “I am so grateful to Lady Business for doing the heavy lifting and writing that smart, detailed report. You saved me from having no data to point to at all. Bless you”

    You’re most welcome. Thank you for this excellent post too.

    • Justine on #

      Thank you. I love that post! I want EVERYONE to read it! Youse are amazing.

  2. Mel @ Subversive Reader on #

    A fabulous and very important conversation to be having!

    You see the devaluing of books by women or about girls in schools when it comes to picking multiple sets, too. Whenever a book with a female protagonist is suggested, you battle teachers who say ‘boys won’t read that’ (with Hating Alison Ashley being one of the lone books which holds against those thoughts). Over and over, teachers are told that ‘boys read differently, so they need different books’. And when boys read those books (often the only ones they’re offered), everyone raves about how great they must be, even when other books weren’t even an option.

    • Justine on #

      Ugh. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecy.

      What is it about Hating Alison Ashley that leads to it being talked about differently?

      • Mel @ Subversive Reader on #

        I’m not sure – it’s on my list for rereading this year, but it’s been a while since I last read it. I’m not sure if it’s seen as ‘more worthy’ now because it’s older (but then, not all of Robin Klein’s books are treated like that) or it’s seen as ‘more relevant’ because it’s mostly set in a school setting, or whether teachers are just happy they don’t have a class like that. Or maybe they like it because it’s an Australian book with a movie attached (even if the movie has little resemblance to the book)

        • Justine on #

          It’s true nothing helps a book’s credibility as much as a movie based on it. I also suspect teachers like that cause they can at least get the reluctant readers to watch the movie.

  3. Megan on #

    Great post! I’ve noticed the same thing about kids’ books – even one about a little girl going on a great adventure has a line about how this girl was doing things that other girls would never dare to do (how hard is it to say that other kids wouldn’t dare if you want to emphasise the danger & excitement?)

    I have to admit that I’ve always favoured realism higher & this has made me think pretty hard about why that is, so thanks for challenging me!

    • Justine on #

      Yeah. It really is so insidious. Depressingly so. And, yes, it would be so easy to change that tag line.

      But you read me! I don’t write much realism. You’re already challenging yourself. 🙂

  4. Dave Hogg on #

    One of the reasons I’ve heard is that the givers of these awards are largely heterosexual women and they have crushes on the male authors and thus are more inclined to reward them.

    What?!? That’s crazy. When we gave out the Reading Robots YA awards at Detcon1 last year, I’m almost positive that our voters weren’t voting on the most crushable authors. Maybe that was our fault – we didn’t include glamour shots when we listed the nominees.

    Of course, we also had female winners in both categories, so maybe we did it the right way after all.

    • Justine on #

      The idea that anyone in a jury setting is going to be solely influenced by which authors they think are hot is insulting. I’ve been in those jury rooms and passions run hot but the passion is in defending and promoting the books we love best.

  5. Rahul Kanakia on #

    Just popping over from Twitter. I think you’re absolutely right in your intuition that you’re understating the number of women in the field. I remember when I first became a YA author, I was shocked by how many women there were. I’d expected it to be circa 70%, but I’ve always found it to be closer to 90%. In that, I think I was fooled by exactly what you’re saying. So many of the big awards books, bestsellers, required texts are by men that in my mental map, the field was much more male than it actually is.

    In fact, I just did a count of the 2015 debut authors, and out of 103 YA debuts, only six were written by men. At my agency retreat as well, there were five men out of some forty attendees.

    In general, I’d expect the demographics of the field to match the demographics of the inflow, unless, due to institutional sexism, men also tended to have longer careers in YA, so that out of every year’s cohort, more women than men stopped publishing (which is something that I think is also probably true, since I think men are more likely to get awards / second chances / etc).

    In my anecdotal opinion, men are treated extremely well in YA. I’ve always felt included and people have gone out of their way to help me. And I think it’s generally true that men in female-dominated professions tend to find that their paths are easier than normal.

    • Justine on #

      Thanks so much for these numbers! I’m not at all surprised.

      And, yes, I suspect you’re exactly right about the relative longevity of male v female careers.

  6. Jenny Rae Rappaport on #

    I would personally love if you would do a post about the picture books you’ve found for your niece that aren’t sexist.

    I have a three year old, and it’s extremely hard to find books that buck the princess trend. Rosie Revere, Engineer and Violet the Piolet are both good titles, for when your niece is a little older. My daughter also loves the Maisy series of books, which drive me batty, but seem to have pretty evenly divided gender roles.

  7. ERose on #

    I think you also have the general principle that young women as consumers are not considered all that discerning – and a lot of genre fiction, especially in the YA world, is considered to be written for young women.
    Ie: if you see a YA book written by a woman, especially in genre fiction, the automatic assumption is that it’s primarily intended for teenage girls, with all the attendant assumptions about that audience attached.
    If you see a YA book written by a man, it’s not that you automatically assume it’s a universal book, it’s that you *don’t* automatically assume it’s for girls, so you look at it from a different starting place.
    You have a few unconscious assumptions at work, but I think the general devaluing of teenage girls as an audience is big with something like a juried award.

    With genre fiction, I think you also have what I call the “Twilight Effect” – that the one YA fantasy book most people know about happened to fit a lot of the worst stereotypes your average non-genre reader holds about YA genre fiction and young female readers.

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