Does the gender of a novel’s protagonist impact readership? A recent study from Cornell University suggests that men may not be deterred by female leads as often as previously thought. The research challenges a common assumption in the literary world, sparking conversation about reader preferences and potential biases.
Federica Bologna, a PhD student in Information Science at Cornell, recruited nearly 3,000 participants – an equal number of men and women – for the study. Participants read two short stories, one about a hiking trip and another set in a coffee shop. The characters in both stories were initially given gender-neutral names: Sam and Alex. Participants were randomly assigned to read versions of the stories where the characters were referred to with “he/him” or “she/her” pronouns, with the pronoun assignments swapped for the other half of the group. The results revealed a striking trend: three-quarters of the men chose the hiking story regardless of the protagonist’s gender. Women, however, showed only a slight preference – not statistically significant – for stories featuring female protagonists.
“My novels have female protagonists and I’ve received the same level of interest from both male and female readers. I’ve even had men explicitly tell me they strongly identify with my female characters,” says Mariana Sández, referencing her latest novel, La vida en miniatura (Impedimenta, 2024). The Argentine author believes people choose books based on personal connection to the themes, rather than the protagonist’s gender. “How many men read Leila Guerriero? And in La llamada, the main character is a woman,” she argues.
Rubén Sarabia Jofre, a communications graduate, radio host, and literary enthusiast on Instagram, shares a similar sentiment. “I enjoy a excellent book regardless of who the protagonist is. All I need is a solid plot, well-developed characters, and, above all, something that resonates with me, something that moves me and makes me feel.” Author Aroa Moreno, based on her experience, doesn’t believe her male readers have been put off by her novels featuring female leads. However, she adds a caveat: “As long as those women embody the archetypical expectations of a female character.”
This point arose in relation to her novel La bajamar (Random House, 2022), which features three narrators – a grandmother, mother, and daughter – spanning three generations and distinct historical, social, and political contexts. “In many book clubs I’ve participated in, I’ve noticed that quite a few men over a certain age disengage with the story of the youngest woman. They understand the grandmother’s story, they understand the mother, but they don’t connect with what happens to Dirane. And what happens to that character are issues that affect us today and are related to our growing awareness, our position as women and mothers today,” she reflects.
Sol Salama, editor and founder of editorial Tránsito, echoes this perception, believing that many male readers experience “a kind of estrangement, a feeling of ‘this isn’t for me’” when a novel is led by a woman. “I think it’s due to a deeply ingrained condescension. And it also has to do with habit: they’ve spent their whole lives reading great literature focused on the epic stories of men, with a serious lack of female characters.” However, Salama believes the reluctance of male readers isn’t so much about the protagonists themselves, but rather the fact that a woman is the author of the novel.
The Men Who Don’t Read Women
Journalist Mary Ann Sieghart highlighted this reality in her 2021 essay The Authority Gap. In an article published in The Guardian, the British author presented some noteworthy data: on average, the top 10 bestselling authors in the UK at the time – including Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, and Danielle Steel – reached only 19% of male readers. Atwood, author of the global success The Handmaid’s Tale, had just 21% male readership. Similar data isn’t available for Spain, but a 2024 analysis by 40dB for EL PAÍS, conducted by political scientist Alba Crusellas, revealed some interesting insights. Among them, the probability of a man having a book by a woman on his nightstand is only 22.5% (compared to 44.5% for women), and the likelihood of a man naming a book by a woman as one that changed his life is a mere 17% (versus 49.2% for women).
At Tránsito, which exclusively publishes female authors, they witness this phenomenon firsthand. Their audience is, in fact, “overwhelmingly” comprised of women. “It’s true that female authors are occupying spaces that were previously inaccessible to them and have flooded catalogs and new release tables, but I feel that what has made that possible is the wave of female readers. More than the moment of the writers or the authors, the moment we are living belongs to the readers,” Salama reflects, noting that the percentage of men who approach Tránsito’s booth to purchase books at events like the Madrid Book Fair “is slight, usually older or very young men.”
María Fasce, literary director of Alfaguara, Lumen, and Reservoir Books, partially agrees with this analysis. More novels by women are being published than ever before (although, according to data from the Ministry of Culture, they still represent only 38.7% of titles published in the “Literary Creation” segment in 2024, a three-point increase since 2018); female readers drive sales, and there’s also a young male readership that is “eagerly” approaching novels written by women. “I see it at book signings, I see it on social media, and it seems like a very interesting phenomenon,” she points out.
As an example, she cites the My Brilliant Friend saga (Lumen), by Elena Ferrante, a tetralogy that initially seemed associated with a female audience, but which younger generations of men are now embracing and reading in a new way: “I’ve heard, for example, teenagers passionately reading the saga and even appropriating the character of Nino, in relation to Nino Sarratore, to refer to the typical pedantic and seductive friends, but about whom women would put a red flag today.”
For Fasce, however, beyond whether a book is written by a man or a woman, the key lies in intimacy, in the approach that authors make to their characters. “Novels like those by Knausgård, A Little Life, Eating Flowers or Oxygen, to name a few recent examples of books that have worked and are working very well, put a magnifying glass on intimacy. There’s a trend in that direction and it’s true that the majority audience for those works are women, but I think the younger male generations are much more open to that intimacy and to letting themselves be surprised,” she concludes.
“Like me in music or cinema, I like things that are deeper, more sensitive, more metaphorical or closer to the person, to the human, to emotions. And perhaps that’s something that a female writer exploits more than a male writer,” agrees Rubén Sarabia Jofre from his perspective as a reader.
Sol Salama acknowledges that prejudices are being broken “little by little,” but warns that, in many cases, the examples one encounters are misleading and falsely encouraging: “Social change is much slower and more costly, and the most widespread reality remains that a book written by a woman is less interesting to men, and they may not even notice it.”
