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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2117 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 11, 2026

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Buried in the culture war thread, there has been some discussion about differences between male and female writers, and how one might recognize the gender of a writer without knowing from the name.

Rowling supposedly writes all her male characters like they are girls. Draco is a bully in a mean girl fashion, while Harry falls in and out of love in a manner more similar to women than men. Another pointed out that male stories tend to converge on one point, whereas those written by women tend to move in many different directions. The "men writing women" tropes are also often telltale sign of author's gender.

I figured it would be fun to ask the rest here: Do you see different trends in how men and women write, and do you believe you can reliably tell the gender of a writer from their works alone?

Men tend to be interested in abstract systems, while women tend to be interested in people and interpersonal relationships. This is reflected in the kind of genres of fiction that the two sexes read and write (men tend to favour thrillers, crime novels and hard SF, while women tend to favour romance novels, family dramas and literary depictions of psychological interiority). Even among writers working in the same nominal genre, the people-vs-things distinction is readily evident: fantasy novels written by men tend to be high fantasy, D&D-adjacent novels which place a lot of emphasis on the rules and mechanics of magic systems, or pseudo-historical fiction examining the political machinations of warring tribes or factions; while fantasy novels written by women are often narrower in scope, focusing on interpersonal relationships in a fantasy setting (e.g. the "romantasy" genre). The people-vs-things distinction is apparent not just at the macro level (plots and genres), but also at the micro level (words and sentences). I imagine if one were to perform an analysis on books written by men vs. women, the latter category would feature a much higher proportion of sentences about the relationships between characters or a character's interior psychological state when compared to the former category, even when controlling for genre.

Needless to say, there are exceptions: one of the most popular romance novelists ever (Nicholas Sparks) is a man, while the most commercially successful novelist ever (Agatha Christie) is a woman best known for her work in a mechanics-focused genre more commonly associated with male writers. But on the whole, women tend to write (and read) novels which are focused on interpersonal relationships and psychological interiority, while men tend to write (and read) novels which are focused on abstract rule-based systems.

Accordingly, I daresay that if I was presented with a thousand words of prose by a novelist with whose work I was erstwhile unfamiliar, I would be able to guess their sex significantly better than chance. Maybe I'll create a survey.

I broadly agree with what you're saying but my impression was that crime/mystery novels were a mostly gender equal genre or even one with a slight female lean.

Hmm, let's see.

  • Searching "bestselling mystery novels of all time" brought me to this list of the hundred best crime novels of all time. By my count 68 entries on the list are solely credited to a male novelist.
  • Time has a similar list of the hundred best mystery/thriller novels ever, with the caveat that they only include one novel per author (so Christie only appears once). Of these, 46% are male, bearing out your hypothesis.
  • This article lists the seven best-selling mystery books in history, of which four were written by men.
  • Wikipedia has a list of the best-selling books of any genre. Searching "crime", "mystery" and "detective" returns ten entries, 7 of which were written by male authors.
  • Penguin polled their readers on the hundred best crime books, of which 47 were written exclusively by male authors.

I think you have a point, books in the crime/mystery genre have a more even gender split than I thought.

That penguin one looks super sketchy with none of the top ten being super popular. https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/mystery

I'm not going to do a bunch but of the top 25 on goodreads (it goes by shelved as mystery popularity not total readership) its 9/25 male authors. Dan brown and stieg larsson each double dipping and agatha christie sweeping 4.

Goodreads has the disadvantage of recency bias and possibly could skew more female than readership in general. But the science fiction stuff skews heavily male. https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/science-fiction Suzanne Collins and Martha Wells are the only women that crack the top 20.

What the fuck kind of push poll did penguin do for that.

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