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3 months ago
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Commentators are asking whether "men are being pushed out of publishing" amid discussion of groupthink, editorial turnover and the gender split of book-prize recipients.
BBC Radio 4 podcast AntiSocial explored this issue on Friday (18th July) following recent widespread social media discussion of an article published in March by the US journal Compact, The Vanishing White Male Writer.
The BBC programme, Are Men Being Pushed out of Publishing?, featured writers Gytha Lodge and Nick Tyrone alongside former Penguin Books communications director Amelia Fairney. The show was hosted by BBC journalists Adam Fleming and Lucy Proctor.
The speakers discussed the gender divide across the industry and in terms of book-buying. Proctor said: "Women are definitely dominating the buying of books – women make up 58% of the buying of books in the UK; this figure goes up just for fiction too.
"Women are also dominating the bestsellers list by quite a country mile: of the top 20 bestselling novels, 17 are written by women; one woman – Freida McFadden – has written five of them."
Proctor also explained that many bestselling male novelists are well-known household names, such as Richard Osman and Bob Mortimer, and that, while women comprise two-thirds of the publishing workforce, only two of the five big publishers have female CEOs.
Across literary prizes and media coverage, Proctor described an even gender balance. "Seven men have won [the Booker Prize] in the last 10 years compared to four women," she said. "We also looked at the Observer’s influential debut novel list – in 2025 they had 11 people, with five men; in 2024 they had 10, five were men."
Proctor added that two of the recent winners of the Nero Prize were male (Colin Barrett and Paul Murray), describing the awards as "pretty even stevens" in terms of gender.
Tyrone disputed that the publishing gender ratio was evenly balanced. "What’s interesting from that perspective is the top male authors, such as Richard Osman and Bob Mortimer, are famous for other things than being an author…"
He also described well-established male authors being "grandfathered in", having become successful decades ago, arguing that "they would have come in when the culture was different and their writing was in vogue".
Tyrone added: "I think the culture in publishing at an editorial level – not at CEO but where you’re being signed, nurtured, talking about what the next book should be – is very, very female-dominated."
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Lodge believes that female writers still miss out more on literary awards. "It is still a struggle to get women recognised in awards categories… I think panels tend to veer towards male selectors and we know men tend to veer towards books by other men… this has a real overall impact.
"The ongoing success of a career – it is still easier in terms of column inches and likelihood of an award – it is still easier as a male author." She spoke of a recent thriller award shortlist, which only consisted of male authors.
Fairney, who recently wrote of fact-checking concerns in the Observer and now works at the misinformation charity Shout Out UK, conceded there is "groupthink" in publishing. "Yes definitely... there are definitely reading trends such as Romantasy, which is very big at the moment, so there will be a push at a publishing house to publish more of those sorts of books. The commercial concerns do come to the fore when it comes to that kind of trend-based publishing."
Tyrone agreed about the impact of "groupthink" in the industry. "You have an industry that is terrified of any controversy to what I’d say is a pathological degree… which I think makes it a bit bloodless… I think that’s why so many editors have left, the money’s not great, you come into it from an idealistic view point… then you find yourself constantly battling a kind of sensitivity-reader culture and eventually you just give up and do something else."
Tyrone also emphasised that staff turnover can upend the author experience. He described how an editor at a publishing house signed his book before telling him she had "quit publishing altogether" which meant he "floated around editors for a long time".
A year later he was taken on by another editor before she also quit. "That is a big thing that affects publishing. You can have a really terrible experience as an author just because of that."
Journalist Toby Young wrote a piece for the Spectator inspired by the Compact article, Let Straight White Men Write Novels, about how his state-of-the-nation manuscript was thwarted by a sensitivity reader: "How dare I, as a straight white man, presume to create a young female character and – worse – a young Black man?"
He referenced writer and critic Jude Cook’s recent publishing venture for male novelists but criticised efforts in this area. "The dearth of young male novelists has reached such a pass that various literary lions are taking steps to address the problem. Unfortunately, their pleas for young men to submit manuscripts are nearly always prefaced by the usual throat-clearing about the insufferable privilege enjoyed by straight white males.
"When will these self-appointed champions of male novelists stop apologising for being men? The literary agent Matthew Hamilton told me an anecdote that illustrated the point: ‘Last week I heard a story of a prominent agent submitting a novel by a straight white male and apologising it was by a straight white male in the accompanying letter. Needless to say, he’s a straight white male.’"
