Male Characters Dominate Fiction, A Recent Study Finds

Fiction, it appears, may be yet another area where women aren't treated equally to men.

I recently wrote about a recent study that, by means of computer analysis, compared 200 novels written by graduates of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs to an equal number of those written by authors without MFAs. You can find that post here. The point of that posting was to take another look at whether getting the time and cost of getting a graduate degree in creative writing is worth it or not.

But the study also came up with another interesting finding: that authors write more about men than about women, perhaps because publishers find such books sell better.



"The percentage of male protagonists in novels written by MFA grads is well over half, at 61%, while that figure is 65% for non-MFA novels," the authors, Richard Jean So and Andrew Piper, wrote. "Further, if a novel has a female lead, the chances that it has two strong female characters is only 32% for both MFA and non-MFA novels. Last, the percentage of novels that have a majority of male character in the non-MFA group is 99%, whereas it is 96% for MFA novels," their article said.

Those results are even more interesting because about 66% of MFA graduates are women, which is about 10 percentage points higher than for the master's degree more generally, the article noted. But the authors did not say what percentage of the books they actually analyzed were authored by females.

"These are terrible numbers by any standard," the study's authors wrote. "They suggest that the contemporary American novel is disproportionately preoccupied with the experiences of men,"

The article in question did not offer any explanation for the focus on men (I guess the computers weren't up to figuring that out), but people tend to like a lot of action in the books they read and as matters stand, alpha males are probably generally viewed as the sort of people most likely to make things happen.

I've seen something of this preference in reader reaction to my novella, "Manhattan Morning." My chief protagonist is a male, but he is for the most part seen reacting to the environment in which he is found, as opposed to making things happen. Several readers, both men and women, have complained that he is too passive, and for some, was only "saved" by the last scene in the book.