As we make summer reading lists, some of us will turn to lists of prize winners for recommendations.
One influential prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, recently celebrated its 30th award winner, The Safekeep by Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden.
The international prize honours the best novel by a woman written in English and published in the United Kingdom. The prize, first awarded in 1996, was founded after no women writers made the 1991 Booker Prize shortlist.
Considering that fiction by women now regularly makes the shortlists of major prizes, it seems timely to ask: do we still need a prize dedicated to women?
We explored this question by creating a new dataset containing information on 15 British literary prizes, with demographic information for 682 shortlisted and winning authors. Our analysis of the dataset shows how there is still a ways to go before women’s writing is valued — awarded, remunerated and read — equally to men’s.
Who wins what prizes?
We are four research collaborators affiliated with the University of Alberta’s Orlando Project, a project that harnesses the power of digital tools and methods to provide new knowledge about feminist literary scholarship. The Orlando Project has published a searchable digital archive with original coding that focuses of women’s relationship to literary production.
We compiled a new dataset to explore how gender, ethnicity and educational achievement impacts who wins what prizes.
When the Women’s Prize first came on the scene in 1996, the average percentage of women winning other U.K. literary prizes actually dropped. The average only began to rise around 2003 when it steadily increased until 2012.
Women won just eight per cent of the prizes in our dataset in 2003, whereas they won 53 per cent in 2012. But that increase plateaued in 2012, and for the next decade it held steady at a running average of 45 per cent. As well, we note no steady linear progression upwards or downwards on average, but there were highs and lows (21 per cent in 2016 followed by 64 per cent in 2017).
Booker winners
Some fluctuation in the winners’ genders is, of course, to be expected. But as is apparent by looking at the percentage of women winners year to year, we should not assume things will always get better.
Other insights from our dataset suggest caution is required in assuming women’s fiction is now equally valued by the literary establishment.
Thirty-nine per cent of Booker shortlisted writers were women, but women have only won 32 per cent of the time. The claim that we don’t need a prize for women since many recent shortlists have been dominated by women needs to be tempered with the fact that while women have made up 57 per cent of the Booker’s shortlist since 2016, only 33 per cent of winners have been women.
Gender and genre
While we expected some differences between genres, we were surprised by just how gendered certain genres are. Seventy-one per cent of the winners of the (now defunct) Costa Children’s Book Award were women, whereas women only constituted 21 per cent for the British Science Fiction Award and 31 per cent for the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award.
Non-fiction writing — which includes history, political science, sport and current affairs — remains male-dominated: the Baillie Gifford award, which bills itself as “U.K.’s premier annual prize for non-fiction books,” has one of the higher percentages of winners who are men, at 67 per cent.
Race and ethnicity
Our dataset includes demographic information on race and ethnicity. It shows that amplifying women’s voices is not simultaneously connected with amplifying all women’s voices.
The Women’s Prize may have succeeded in pushing the Booker to include more women’s fiction (from zero shortlisted when the Women’s Prize was announced in 1990, to 26 per cent when it made its first award in 1996, to 58 per cent in 2022). But the Booker marginally out-performed the Women’s Prize in relation to racialized writers over the period of our dataset (26 per cent for the former, 22 per cent for the latter).
A recent book on white literary taste concentrates on the Women’s Prize to show how prizes in general are part of a literary eco-system that is racially biased.
Fiction reading not as valued as used to be
We also question what it means that women’s fiction has greater visibility at the same time when fewer and fewer people, and especially men, read fiction.
Using Nielsen BookScan data, the Women’s Prize 2024 Impact Report points to statistics on fiction authorship and gendered readership: women published 57 per cent of the top 500 bestselling novels in 2023, but while women constitute 44 per cent of readers of the top men’s fiction, men only account for 19 per cent of readers of fiction by women.
The fact that fewer people are reading fiction at the same time that women are winning more awards, could suggest we are witnessing a repeat of the familiar pattern in women’s history where, at the same historical moment when women achieve dominance, or increase, in a field, and it becomes “feminized,” the field as a whole loses its value or prestige. Examples are family medicine or humanities professors.
Pattern around gender and genre
The Orlando Project’s research on 800 years of women’s writing in Britain reveals a pattern around gender and genre when in comes to remuneration and literary prestige. Genres where women writers dominate, like children’s literature and romance, tend to be the least lucrative.
Novels in the time of Jane Austen illustrate the point. Before Walter Scott and other male writers developed a highbrow “serious” Victorian novel over what they saw as trashy romances, women writers temporarily dominated fiction like they do today. As one of us has argued, when women writers published more novels than men did in the 1790s, novels were the literary genre that paid the least.
There remains a gender pay equity gap in writing: British women earned 58.6 per cent of what men did in 2022, mostly because the genres they chose to write in do not garner the highest earnings.
Rewarding women authors
One way to answer our question of whether we still need a Women’s Prize is this: we will no longer need it when women begin to dominate prizes for prestige genres such as non-fiction; when men read as much writing by women as that by men; and when we pay authors as much as football players.
So far, we’re not there. We therefore celebrate that in 2023, the Women’s Prize added a new award in non-fiction to address that genre’s gender disparity. The Story of a Heart by practising palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke won this year.
We encourage readers to take all the Women’s Prize-winning and nominated books to the beach this summer.
Binhammer, Katherine receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Kanika Batra receives funding from Fulbright Canada.
Maryse Jayasuriya and Theo Gray do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
