Female Authors Outnumber Male Authors
May 2, 2023 – As an author of two books and three more in the making, I was quite excited to find out that women are now publishing more books than men!
This growing trend of female authors is also diversifying what is getting written about as – surprise, surprise – women view things differently than men.
I saw this same phenomenon in my research on political leadership. There is a clear gap in female scholars researching political leadership. Studies have found only two contributions on political leadership in Africa from female scholars in peer-reviewed journals over the past sixty years.
This is a huge loss to the scholarship on political leadership as female scholars are known to focus on new and alternative leadership themes - like when I chose to interview Africa’s Heads of State face-to-face instead of just observing them from a distance.
Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota, was the one who set out to study book publishing and found that by 2020, for the first time in history, women were publishing more books than men.
His research concluded that it was not a case of either/or. The influx of female authors has grown the entire industry – numerically and content-wise.
Waldfogel concluded the same thing that political leadership scholars realized: the influx of female authors offered new and different narratives and perspectives that would otherwise have gone unwritten.
Waldford further noted in his study that “while revenue gains to female authors come partly at the expense of male authors, gains to consumers from inclusive innovation are experienced by a wide range of consumers.”
Find out more about my books by clicking on the highlighted links below.
- Africa: Open for Business. Discover the ABCs of doing business in Africa and why now is the time to invest in this continent of opportunity
- Africa: Reframing Political Leadership. Discover new insights and the importance of leading from life through interviews with Africa’s Heads of State.