I’m male, and I have no problem with female authors. Just looking around, I own books by Andre Norton, CJ Cherryh, Tanith Lee, Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, PN Elrod, Jane Lindskold, Jean Lorrah, Holly Lisle, Patricia Wrede, Jo Clayton, Janet Kagan, Marion Zimmer Bradley (including most of her Sword and Sorceress short story collections with all-female authors), Emma Bull, Julian May, Doris Egan, Doris Piserchia, Katherine Kurtz, Louise Cooper, Leigh Brackett, Pamela Dean, Melissa Scott, Sheri S Tepper, Diane Duane, and P.C. Hodgell. I’m sure I could find more, and I’m not sure of the gender of others.
Now, there are certain character types, styles, subjects and so on that tend to be favored by women authors that I find boring or irritating; but that just means avoiding those specific authors/books or skimming over those parts.
Sword & Sorceress did not have all-female authors. It had female protagonists. (And even then then it wasn’t all female; Jennifer Roberson’s Del & Tiger stories started there, and those have a male narrator, himself the sidekick to a female hero.)
No, I am not. However, as I said, the unrealistic portrayal of men in many of the novels I have read written by woman becomes too jarring for me to enjoy them.
I don’t have many books on my Kindle, but my bookshelves are “sexist”. As others have said, it has more to do with the types of books I like to read.
I very rarely read fiction, and when I do it tends to be the “classics” such as Shakespeare or Twain. The non-fiction I read tends to be pop-science or computer / math related. While there are certainly good books by female authors in these categories (my Kindle contains “Complexity: A Guided Tour” by Melanie Mitchell), the authors of these types of books are predominately men.
I’m kinda the same, except that most of the non-fiction I’ve recently read has been written by men. This is partly because i’ve started listening to a lot of audiobooks while walking the dog; for that, non-fiction works much better, and works by men also work somewhat better, because they’re less likely to have a narrator who sounds like Barbie on helium.
There’s a reason that lots of female authors used to go by either initials (HM Hoover) or fake names (George Elliot). Hell, even JK Rowling didn’t use her first name because she didn’t want to deter male readers.
I don’t read fiction very often these days, but back when I did, I read plenty of female authors. (I’m male, BTW). I’d read more male writers, sure, but I’d say 20 - 25% of the authors were female.
I got sick of fiction after about a million novels and now find that, apart from a couple of favourite authors (Terry Pratchett, for instance), I just can’t read it any more. The last female fiction author I read was JK Rowling.
I read mostly history and and science nowadays, along with some biographies and a little true crime stuff. All far weirder and far more unpredictable than fiction. Many of the authors are female - looking through my eBook collection, I see:
Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Deborah Blum - The Poisoner’s Handbook Amy Stewart - Wicked Plants
Emily Dickinson Complete Poems
Autobiog/memoir) Loretta Lynn - Coal Miner’s Daughter Pat Benatar - Between a Heart and a Rock Place (I’m not really a fan, but I read pretty much any music-related book I find, and it looks interesting) Patti Smith - Just Kids (I am a big fan of Ms Smith, and I read this in dead-tree format, but I’m happy to own it as an eBook.)
So that’s about 20% of my eBooks, which makes my Kindle reasonably non-sexist.
I read a lot of science non-fiction which tends to be written by men unfortunately. But I generallly have no idea who wrote the books I read, having picked them by browsing titles in the Kindle Bookstore.
15.04% of the authors on my Kindle are women. 21.28% of the books on my Kindle were written by women. The gap there is because when I do read genre fiction it seems the series I’ve read are more likely to have a female author.
Looking at my bookshelves, there’s a definite bias toward male authors, and I’m a male.
For poetry, erotica, 'zines, fantasy, and short stories, the authors are mostly female. Essays and (auto)biography are about 50/50. For novels and classic literature, about 2/3 male. For comics, non-bio non-fiction, and reference, almost exclusively male. Classic lit, non-fiction, and reference make up the bulk of my library, so my library is mostly male as well.
I pay no attention to the gender of authors. I read whatever interests me, and that means a healthy range of both. It may even be close to a 50% split, though I suspect probably more like 60/40.
I don’t have an e-Reader, so can’t check statistics.
Female authors often have a different outlook to the world then the one that I hold, so that what they often find interesting or relevant to the story doesn’t hold the same appeal to me.
If we’re in a desperate struggle against the nazis/Mongol hordes/KGB/earthquake etc. then I’m not really concerned that Brad is holding back romantic feelings for Sue, or hearing what Sue is wearing in great detail, or the full and complete details of herbal recipes.
Also I find that authors who try to depict the feelings and outlook of the main character of the opposite sex are unconvincing usually.
This applies not just to women authors depicting men, but men trying to portray women.
Even my favourite male authors can and do fall down on this.
But there are exceptions to the rule, the most notable one being Colleen McCullough, who in her "Masters of Rome "series showed true genius in her character depiction, both male and female.
That said, I’ve tried and failed to many times to enjoy the work of women authors , actually reading quite a few of their books (Rosemarie Rowe,Ellis Peters, Lindsey Davis amongst others), so now I just don’t bother to try anymore.
Can I just say that I had to rephrase the previous paragraph several times because each of my previous attempts sounded like sexual innuendo.
(Enjoying women authors, trying to get into women authors etc.)
In roughly descending order, and based largely on the books under my bed, my favorite authors are:
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Italo Calvino
G.K. Chesterton
Raymond Chandler
Isaac Asimov
Fritz Leiber
Joseph Heller
Agatha Christie
Dashiell Hammett
Saki
Edward Gorey
Douglas Adams
J.D. Salinger
Albert Camus
Kurt Vonnegut
Arthur Conan Doyle
Franz Kafka
Roger Zelazny
Neil Gaiman
C.S. Lewis
20 authors, and only one woman. I’m a little surprised, but I don’t think I am biased against female authors. There are many alternative explanations, such as:
I am biased against new books. Due to sexism, women are less represented in the mostly older books I read.
Women tend to be less represented in some genres I enjoy (Agatha Christie is an exception, and is my second favorite mystery author).
Bias against women is self perpetuating, partly through exactly the kind of list I just posted. Many of those authors I learned about from recommendations, and in turn recommended to others. If the “original source” for these recommendations was biased, then that bias will be unintentionally passed along with lists like this.
I am male. Among novels I’ve read in the last year or so it looks like 30 to 40% were written by females. Among non-fiction books, it’s over 90% male. That may be a function of the kinds of non-fiction books I like: popular to semi-technical works about physics, astronomy, economics, and linguistics.
I tend towards reading male authors instead of female authors. However, it’s more about the style of writing that female authors tend to write in that puts me off. There are certainly lots of female authors that I’ve really loved reading. For instance, I thought Water For Elephants was great, and I’ve really enjoyed reading Julia Glass’ work (although I thought I See You Everywhere was not nearly as strong as her first two).
The problem for me with many female writers is that I think they do such a poor job describing conflict between their characters in a very realistic way. I used to love reading Patricia Cornwell’s books, but after the fourth or fifth, she began attempting to introduce more conflict between the recurring characters she developed, and she was really just very hamfisted with it. On the other hand, Nevada Barr writes in the same genre, and I’ve continued to enjoy each of her books very much.
Somewhat similarly, I tend to steer clear of female British mystery writers, because they appear to like to bring dozens upon dozens of characters into their books. I see that as really poor writing or poor editing; it’s just not necessary from a narrative standpoint and makes the books lose any momentum. For my most recent example of this, I dare you to read Careless in Red, by Elizabeth George. If you do, just for fun, keep track of the number of different characters that are introduced throughout the book.
On both of these points, I would point to J.K Rowling’s work for examples. Certainly lots of needless characters and a significantly poor job done by her editors, but the most glaring problem is the simplistic, unrealistic and two-dimensional nature of her handling of conflict between her characters.
I’m certainly not saying that men are reliably better writers than women. I’ve read plenty of bad fiction written by men. But they are typically bad in very different ways compared to women.
I don’t tend to keep track of who is the author of the books I read any more than I pay attention to who sings the songs I listen to, but I do notice that all the webcomics I read are written by men, even the ones I though had to have been written by women.