Writers and Artists
Whose voices get heard?
Writers
The World’s Highest-Paid Authors of 2018, according to Forbes (based on data from NPD BookScan & Box Office Mojo), are:
James Patterson
Earnings: $86 millionJ.K. Rowling
Earnings: $54 millionStephen King
Earnings: $27 millionJohn Grisham
Earnings: $21 millionDan Brown (tie)
Earnings: $18.5 millionJeff Kinney (tie)
Earnings: $18.5 millionMichael Wolff
Earnings: $13 millionNora Roberts (tie)
Earnings: $12 millionDanielle Steel (tie)
Earnings: $12 millionE.L James (tie)
Earnings: $10.5 millionRick Riordan (tie)
Earnings: $10.5 million
Note: Forbes updated this list in 2019, and no updates available since the Covid19 pandemic.
This article was published in thejakartapost.com with the title "What chefs think of James Patterson’s new thriller, ‘The Chef’".
Click here to read.
Assessing NYT Bestseller Lists by gender of authors:
For the 52 weeks of 2018, male authors led the NYTimes Bestseller list for 35 weeks, and female authors (often writing under male pseudonyms) captured 17 weeks atop the list. Many authors made the list multiple times for different novels; notably James Patterson with four novels (including the blockbuster The President is Missing, co-authored with former President Bill Clinton), Nora Roberts with four titles (two under her genderless pen-name J.D. Robb), and Danielle Steel with two novels.
For the 51 weeks of 2018 that the New York Times tracked non-fiction bestsellers, male authors led the list for 37 weeks, and female authors led the list 14 weeks. Michelle Obama’s book Becoming topped the list for all five weeks in December, and Tara Westover’s book Educated was the best seller for three separate weeks in March, July and September.
Overall, female fiction authors have achieved parity (50%) of sales and titles in one year since 2000, and near parity in a couple of other years this century. While this is great news, Rosie Cima chronicles in her article Bias, She Wrote that while “books by women are as valuable to the book-buying public as books by men,” a recent VIDA Count study found that women authors had just 20-30% of the titles reviewed in the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books. Cima also notes that Ruth Franklin at the New Republic performed an analysis of 13 publisher’s catalogues and found that 11 of them “had heavily male biased catalogues,” with under 30% of titles written by women. The Huffington Post found similar gender bias by publishing houses.
And while women are the majority of book buyers and readers of fiction in America, much genre fiction – whether romance or mystery – flies under the radar of what reaches and affects the overall culture.
In this regard, literary awards matter. UPenn English major Savannah Lambert undertook a data study of top literary awards, in an effort to “learn more about why books by women (and about women) are less likely to win awards.”
Lambert reviewed “three major U.S. awards—the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle award—between 1990 and 2016.” Men received 60% of these three awards. Further, women’s fiction was more likely to win if their novels focused on men or boys as central characters.
Aamna Mohdin, writing for Quartz in 2016, detailed this same “gender gap” in major literary awards, both by gender and by the gender of protagonists, and includes charts and data:
Quartz, Women are horribly under-represented in the world’s top literary awards
Seattle author Nicola Griffith analyzed 15 years’ worth of awards for literary fiction, including the Pulitzer, Man Booker Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics’ Circle Award, Hugo Award and the Newbery. Griffith’s findings about gender of author and gender of central characters of the winners are:
Pulitzer Prize 2000-2015
To see Dr. Griffith’s charts for the Man Booker Awards, National Book Awards, NBCC, Hugo Award Best Novel, and Newbery Medal, click here: “Books about Women Tend not to Win Awards”
Griffith draws these conclusions from her research:
At the top of the prestige ladder, for the Pulitzer Prize women wrote zero out of 15 prize-winning books wholly from the point of view of a woman or girl. Zero. For the prize that recognizes “the most distinguished fiction by an American author,” not a single book-length work from a woman’s perspective or about a woman was considered worthy. Women aren’t interesting, this result says. Women don’t count.
At the bottom of the prestige ladder—judging by the abundance of articles complaining that YA isn’t fit fare for grownups—for the Newbery Medal, awarded to “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children,” women wrote wholly from girls’ perspectives 5 times—and men wrote so 3 times. Girls, then, are interesting. Girls count.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, when it comes to literary prizes, the more prestigious, influential and financially remunerative the award, the less likely the winner is to write about grown women. Either this means that women writers are self-censoring, or those who judge literary worthiness find women frightening, distasteful, or boring. Certainly, the results argue for women’s perspectives being considered uninteresting or unworthy. Women seem to have literary cooties.
The literary establishment doesn’t like books about women.
Artists
“Women make babies. Men make culture.”
Joan Semmel, Painter & Artist
This line is spoken in the first of a short film series created by Artsy (and funded by Gucci) entitled Artists for Gender Equality I. Past. II. Present. III. Future.
Art expert Todd Levin states that “through the 1950s, the art of history that we know was an Art that was made by men, largely to be consumed by men.”
“In 1989,” according to the film, “the Guerilla Girls counted” the female representation “in the The Met’s modern art sections. Less than 5% of the artists were women, and 85% of the nudes were female.[1]” (The Guerilla Girls is a group of women artists and arts professionals.)
The second film, II. Present, notes that “As of Spring 2015, over 90% of works on display in MoMA’s permanent collection galleries were by male artists.”
Links to the three short films:
Shankar Vedantam, host of NPR’s Hidden Brain, speaking to Steve Inskeep of NPR’s Morning Edition in September of 2018, explored the financial disparities found in 2 million fine art sales at auction. Vendantam interviewed Oxford finance professor Renee Adams, who was researching the question, Is the dearth of female artists due to the art market, or is it somehow inherent in the type of art that women produce? Professor Adams’ team created computer generated art and told affluent volunteers that the painter was either a man or a woman. The potential art buyers, “especially men, rate art as less compelling when it is said to be painted by a woman.” At art auctions, the paintings of famous “female artists sell at a discount of 42.1 percent” to those of male artists.
Shankar Vedantam concludes, “Sexism reaches into the grave. If you’re a dead female artist, you’re still playing catch-up with the guys.”
Susan Fisher Sterling, Director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in D.C. told Huffington Post in 2016,
“The National Museum of Women in Arts remains the only major museum in the world solely dedicated to celebrating the creative contributions of women artists. We don’t mind keeping that distinction until our job is done.”
The NMWA publishes a fact sheet about the drastic under-representation of women artists.
Key findings include:
Out of over 10,000 artists in the permanent collections of 18 top art museums in the U.S. -- 87% are male. (Public Library of Science)
Curator Maura Reilly reported a “huge gender disparity in solo exhibitions, with few major institutions even reaching 30% (ARTnews, The Art Newspaper)
In 2018, only a third of 820,000 public and commercial exhibitions were by women artists. (The Art Newspaper). Only 30% of artists represented by US galleries are women. In European and North American galleries, only 13.7% of living artists represented are women. (artnet News). 10% of galleries in the Artsy database of 3,050 galleries have no women artists at all. (The Art Newspaper).
Women now “make up a majority of professional art museum staff, but are “underrepresented in leadership positions, especially at museums with budgets greater than $15 million. (Association of Art Museum Directors)
In September 2019, Smithsonian.com writer Meilan Solly reported the findings from “a joint investigation conducted by artnet News and In Other Words” regarding the lack of “gender parity in American museums,” citing that “works by women constituted just 11% of acquisitions and 14% of exhibitions at 26 major American museums” in the most recent decade ending 2018. This and similar articles show the persistence of gender bias, especially in subjective and decentralized arenas.
As for currently working artists, women are just 46% of working artists, despite earning 70% of BFAs and 70% of MFAs in the US alone. Across arts professions, women earn $20,000 less on average per year.
What will it take for women to get into the Power Percentage among Writers and Artists?