I was going about my day, checking Instagram, twitter, Snap chat, when I came upon an interesting article. As I tap through the pages on Buzz feed snap chat I come across “A Bookstore Is Displaying All Books By Men Backward, And It’s Eye Opening”by book store owner Harriet Logan . The purpose of the arrangement of books was to show rather than tell how much more prominent men are in the written world than women. The fiction gender gap, the term she has used to explain the significant difference in the published works by men versus women, is a phenomenon I was not aware of. I had heard of the wage gap and that there is a large gap between men working in government and women, but never a writing gap. Maybe some of this blindness is due to my awareness as well as the media’s awareness of the leading lady fiction writer, J.K. Rowling.
Is this a strategy people use in other gender related debates. For example if I asked “why are there so few women fiction authors in comparison to men?” Would my opponent say something along the lines of “Well how can you say that, look at J.K. Rowling! She’s one of the best fiction writers of your generation and she’s a woman”?
Yes that is true but that doesn’t answer my question. Are there more published fiction male writers just because they got a head start on being in this field longer than women? Is the world unaware of a bias it may have towards female writers? I don’t really know but I look forward to reading any update or response articles to Harriet Logan’s piece.
