Last year, during the brouhaha about whether men are being pushed out of writing fiction I wrote: “Maybe men are being published less. I don’t know. No-one knows because no-one has counted.” Well, Dan Sinykin has done some counting.
Here I bring in a new tranche of data: short stories. Over the last few months, with Claude Code, I gathered data for 211 literary magazines, spanning 1841–2026, which amounts to more than 289,000 stories and 63,000 authors. Some of this data—especially twentieth-century pulps and slicks—is drawn from the Fiction Magazine Index, a crowdsourced project created by William G. Contento and edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne. Nora Shaalan provided the foundation for the New Yorker data.
According to this data, women have more than tripled their share of the short stories in these 211 magazines. Women outpublished men in the mid-nineteenth century, underwent a precipitous decline in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s, hovered around 20% from the 1910s through the 1970s, before climbing decade-by-decade, only exceeding men in the 2020s, for the first time in 150 years at 54.6%.
Dan’s results roughly match the pattern of a study published in 2019. So men are being published less but that means men and women are now at about parity. As he writes,
Fiction in the US has undergone a tremendous demographic transformation in the last fifty years. Men have lost a lot of ground, which women have gained. But the way some commentators have written about it, you’d think men are, as the New York Times headline suggested, disappearing. Hardly! Women have just caught up.
Read the whole thing. I still don’t think this “matters” in any literary sense, but for those who care, these numbers should be taken account of.
It is refreshing to see some actual data in this fraught discussion.
"Women outpublished men in the mid 19th century"
This fascinates me: I would not have expected it.