This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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I’ve just finished a very unusual book: Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan. Its themes, characters and the author’s style of writing are all exceptionally good but that’s not why this book is unusual. It’s more because it’s a new and critically acclaimed work of literary fiction written by a man. 

If you’ve seen the inside of any bookshop in the last few years, you’ll know how rare this has become. The vast majority of new fiction and its most praised and promoted authors are female. And yet the principal reason for this is seldom discussed. 

So let’s discuss it, shall we? Let’s bring the elephant into the room. The publishing industry is suffering from a damaging gender imbalance. According to a recent UK publishers’ survey, 83 per cent of marketing, 92 per cent of publicity and 78 per cent of editorial staff in Britain’s publishing industry are female. Taking an average of those three figures suggests an industry whose employees are 84 per cent female. 

Such a huge gender imbalance in any industry — either way around — is unhealthy and if men are assumed to not read much fiction anymore then this may well be part of the explanation. For, whereas a few years back, there were plenty of male fiction writers, there are now vanishingly few. Andrew O’Hagan (right) is more the exception than the rule.

Female agents and female editors take on female authors whose books appeal to the female market. Female marketing and female PR staff then aim their sales campaigns at female readers. According to figures obtained by The Bookseller in 2021, 75 per cent of new titles in the general and literary fiction category were by female authors. I’d wager that it’s now considerably more.

In the last four years of the prestigious Costa First Novel Award, 16 authors were nominated for the prize. Thirteen were female. For the more recent Authors’ Club First Novel Award, there was a shortlist of six authors. Five were female. As were the guest adjudicator and the chair of judges. 

Though, I suppose, at least both competitions were open to male authors. Unlike the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. How have we come to this? How has the publishing industry become so out of touch and left behind in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion?

When I was writing fiction, I saw at first hand how the publishing world’s employees exist in an aloof and muliebral bubble where insufficient effort is made to consider anyone outside of it. Those I dealt with were perfectly nice and very good. They had no sinister, misandrist agenda but they could be terribly patronising towards 50 per cent of the human race. “Men,” was the general attitude, delivered with a condescending smile. “They just read Jeremy Clarkson and footballers’ memoirs. They don’t like fiction.”

“Well,” I wondered as I had to stand my ground to prevent the bright red cover of my second novel being changed to bright pink, “Have you ever wondered why?”

And anyway, their assertions about men’s reading habits simply weren’t true. At least they weren’t until the publishing industry’s gender became so unacceptably skewed.

The industry once had a proud reputation of genuine equality. Men and women still have an equally illustrious history of writing fiction but now the preponderance of women in publishing risks that natural equilibrium being destroyed.

I was taught to appraise and appreciate fiction by Mr Webber at primary school and both Mr Cornes and Mr Crawford at secondary school. Apart from their love of literature, can you see what else those teachers had in common? My own appreciation was honed and augmented by David Lodge whose collected essays — published as The Art of Fiction — remains a wonderful companion to illustrate and elucidate fiction’s many forms.

And how many people owe their love of reading fiction and their skill at writing it to Malcolm Bradbury and his famous creative writing course at the University of East Anglia? To say that men neither read nor want to write fiction is itself a fiction.

Some might argue that the current situation is just reparation for centuries of patriarchal hegemony. Look at Mary Ann Evans, who had to call herself George Eliot to get her work published in 1859 (below), though decades before that, Jane Austen hid her identity, though not her gender, when she published under the nom de plume “A Lady” and though the Brontë sisters also used assumed names, it seems their motivation was preserving their privacy, rather than hiding their gender. Being a woman didn’t appear to be a barrier for Mary Ann’s contemporary, Elizabeth Gaskell.

The experience has been quite different for a friend of mine, a successful fiction writer whose books were always published under his own name. Mandated by his publisher, he now has to write under a nom de plume to disguise his Y chromosome.

Tales like that make me grateful that I had a dual career in advertising. The ad industry has proved far more progressive and enlightened than publishing because a few years ago, it faced a very similar problem.

Where I worked, in the creative department where all the ads are written and designed, the overwhelming majority of copywriters and art directors were male. There was no conscious discrimination against women and, just like talented male novelists, there were plenty of talented female copywriters. However, in an environment where around 80 per cent of their colleagues were of the opposite sex, they instinctively felt out of place. Sound familiar? 

The difference was that ad agencies realised they needed more ads written from a female perspective, so they took positive steps to recruit and welcome more women. The same issue was recognised and is being addressed in the media and other creative industries too. Only the publishing industry seems to be so stubbornly out of kilter, still wilfully refusing to embrace gender equality. 

Though perhaps the problem stems from gender imbalance in another profession. Two thirds of all secondary school teachers are now female. The percentage for English teachers is even higher, so you’re unlikely to readily find the successors to Messrs Webber, Crawford and Cornes. In fact, in a quarter of UK schools, you won’t find any male teachers at all. 

So if the teaching of literature is now predominantly female, perhaps the reading, writing and publishing of it would inevitably follow suit. Though unlike state education, publishing is a business dependent on paying customers and by neglecting about half of them, it’s doing itself enormous commercial harm. 

Other industries are light years ahead of publishing when it comes to equal opportunities, so its senior managers need to act, and act quickly. They need to visit colleges and universities to encourage more male graduates into the industry. They have to present publishing as a viable career option for young men because, not surprisingly, they now view publishing as negatively as young women viewed merchant banking in the 1980s.

This would be the first step to establishing a healthier and more representative gender balance. More male editors would encourage more male writers who, in turn, would encourage more male readers. 

Perhaps, in the name of equality, the industry could introduce a Male Prize for Fiction. Or better still, just drop the word “Women’s” from the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It’s an unwelcome relic of a bygone age. 

Put simply, we need more Andrew O’Hagans. Because if publishers start considering men and catering for them, they’ll start buying fiction in the future, just as they always did in the past.