purple motes

Men differ significantly from women in social communication.  Analysis of sex differences in literary reading illustrates this difference.

Dana Gioia, serving as the (male) Chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), released in 2004 an NEA study entitled Reading at Risk.  This study, which surveyed a representative sample of the adult U.S. population, found that 37.6% of men and 55.1% of women had read a work of literature in the past year.  The share of men and women reading a work of literature fell 11.5% and 7.9% respectively over the previous two decades.  The Gioia-led NEA emphasized the grave public danger of the decline in literary reading.  The NEA downplayed the large difference between men and women.  If literary reading has great public importance, then programs to encourage more men to read literature would seem to be sensible policy.  The male Chairman of the the NEA, deeply concerned about the extent of literary reading, seems to have been uninterested or unable to express concern about ordinary men.

Lisa Jardine, CBE, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, formerly Head of the School of English and Drama, and Dean of Arts, now Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, also led an examination of literary reading.  The Orange Prize for Fiction, a prize that explicitly excludes male authors, commissioned Jardine for the project.  Jardine first focused on women.  In 2004, she and her colleagues surveyed "400 women from the worlds of academia, arts, publishing and literary criticism ... including many previous judges of the Orange Prize."  The results of this survey, called "Women's Watershed Fiction,"  appeared in a press release and twenty-nine newspaper article references.   Three years later, Jardine did a similar survey of "400 men from the worlds of academia, arts, publishing and literary criticism."  This survey was called  "Men's Milestone Fiction."  It differed from the earlier survey of women primarily in alliteration.  This study also generated a press release and seven newspaper article references, as well as some carefully posed attention from scholars on a literary blog.

Professor Jardine's statements reported in a newspaper article on "Men's Milestone Fiction" provide an interesting counterpoint to the NEA study of literary reading.    According to the newspaper article, Jardine and her colleagues were shocked by the sex differences that they found:

"We were completely taken aback by the results," said Prof Jardine, who admitted that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliche, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle.

For a post-modern creationist unaware of the social construction of the social construction of gender, these results would indeed be shocking. But they probably wouldn't shock any scholar who had read the results of the NEA's research three years' earlier. Even a rudimentary appreciation for evolutionary biology makes sex difference in communication likely.  Comparative anatomy and ethology across primates is consistent with sex differences in communication.  So too is considerable human behavioral data.

Jardine's communicative behavior differed significantly from Gioia's.  According to the newspaper article, Jardine declared:

Prof Jardine said that the research suggested that the literary world was run by the wrong people. "What I find extraordinary is the hold the male cultural establishment has over book prizes like the Booker, for instance, and in deciding what is the best. This is completely at odds with their lack of interest in fiction. On the other hand, the Orange prize for fiction [which honours women authors  - Guardian editor] is still regarded as ephemeral."

Jardine was Chair of Judges of the Orange Prize in 1997. She declares that her survey supports more power and honor for the organization that commissioned her work and for persons like her.  But Jardine also has broader public interests:

"On the whole, men between the ages of 20 and 50 do not read fiction. This should have some impact on the book trade. There was a moment when car manufacturers realised that it was women who bought the family car, and the whole industry changed. We need fiction publishers - many of whom are women - to go through the same kind of recognition," Prof Jardine said.

Perhaps she would like fiction publishers to publish more works by women authors.  That would benefit the relatively small share of women authors in the overall population of Britain.  It might also lead to women reading more fiction, and men, less.  Perhaps that would also benefit women, or at least women not interested in having relationships with more imaginative men.  Like Gioia, Jardine doesn't seem interested in encouraging men to read more fiction.

Gioia and Jardine exemplify elite behavior deeply rooted in human male and female evolutionary psychology.   Men's lives tend to be less valued than women's because the fecundity of human communities has been more positively correlated with the number of women than the number of men.  Elite men gain their status by out-competing other men in delivering goods to women.  Elite women gain their status by out-competing other women in delivering goods to women.   That the fate of ordinary men is of relatively little concern to either is a deeply rooted psychological problem that societies may eventually have to confront.

Offer Comments

Jack:  "There will never be another like Walter Concrete.  He was the most trusted man in America."

Jill:  "How do you know he was the most trusted man in America?"

Jack: "Somebody said so on television."

Jill: "...and that's the way it is."

Offer Comments

The rapid growth of novels in the late eighteenth-century was an important communications industry development. A large number of manuscripts of novels were available to printers at low cost. Printing novels was a profit-driven business, as was book-selling and book-lending through commercial circulating libraries. Printers chose novels to print with keen regard for market demand. Hence studying what novels were printed provides insight into what readers sought.

Female authors predominated among the authors of English novels for about thirty-five years after the production of novels rose sharply. The number of new novels printed in Britain and Ireland roughly doubled from the first half of the 1780s to the second half of the 1780s, rising above 50 novels per year and remaining above that level permanently. Across the years from 1785 to 1819, the median ratio of male-authored novels to female-authored novels was 0.69, meaning that male-authored novels numbered about 31% fewer than female-authored novels.[1]

[graph with underlying data and source citations here]

Printers probably favored female authors because they judged female authors to have better prospects of successfully serving readers' demands. Female authors on average probably understood the literary demands of female readers better than male authors did. Hence the sex ratio for authors suggests that, for thirty-five years after novels became a much more popular good, female readers predominated. These were also the years when women workers, including married women, were a large share of the new cotton factory workforce. Thus, even when women were taking jobs outside the home in a new, high-profile segment of the economy, women probably were also spending more time reading fiction than were men.[2]

Given the biological facts of human sexual reproduction and the evolutionary creation of the human animal, one should expect the behavior of males and females to differ significantly. In the contemporary U.S., men are much less likely to read literary works than are women. Taking sex differences seriously is important for thinking about the development and marketing of communication services.

Notes:

[1] The ratio of male-authored to female-authored novels is not the same statistic as the ratio of male authors to female authors of novels, because some authors wrote multiple novels. Raven (2003) p. 150 declares that the latter statistic is "far more significant" than the former, but does not clearly specify why. From 1770 to 1799, the number of male authors of novels was 54% greater than the number of female authors of novels. See Raven (2000) p. 41. Since authorship of novels typically generated little profit in money or social status, the latter statistic indicates that authorship disadvantaged men more than women. Authors, however, were a much smaller share of the population than were readers.

[2] Tepper (2000) analyzes the "gender gap" in fiction reading in the U.S. This work notes that fiction reading is "passive and generally home based" and states that "girls are still socialized into passive, private and non-competitive activities, while boys are channeled into activities which tend to be aggressive, competitive, creative, and leadership-oriented" (p. 272). It cites an authority who declares that "inequalities persist for women in their opportunities for leisure" and concludes that socialization accounts for women reading more fiction than men (id.). Tepper seems not to have considered the possibility that particular patterns of socialization of males and females are part of evolved human development paths and might be extremely difficult to change without tyrannical force. Note that Tepper's concern about women's fiction reading goes against the fundamental theme of the NEA's study, Reading at Risk. Neither Tepper (2000) nor Reading at Risk shows much concern for men.

References:

Raven, James (2000), "Historical Introduction: The Novel Comes of Age," in The English novel, 1770-1829: a bibliographical survey of prose fiction published in the British Isles, gen. eds. Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (Oxford: Oxford University Press), vol. 1, pp. 15-121.

Raven, James (2003), "The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1830," in The faces of anonymity: anonymous and pseudonymous publications from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, Robert J. Griffin, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), Ch. 6.

Tepper, Steven J. (2000), "Fiction Reading in America: Explaining the gender gap," Poetics 27, pp. 255-75.

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The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) this fall will release another report lamenting the decline of literary reading. From the late seventeenth century through the early twentieth century, many cultural leaders would have applauded a decline in reading of popular novels. Now, however, such a decline is a cause for grave concern. Fiction has become a major public good.

Appreciating modern fiction requires considerable sophistication. The Executive Summary of the NEA's 2004 report, Reading at Risk, declared:

Reading at Risk presents a distressing but objective overview of national trends. The accelerating declines in literary reading among all demographic groups of American adults indicate an imminent cultural crisis.

The NEA's news release begin with this description:

Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature.... The study also documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002....

The report's Executive Summary included this finding:

4. Women read more literature than men do, but literary reading by both groups is declining at significant rates.

Under that finding was this data:

Thus less than half of American men have read literature for at least as far back as 1982. While the overall share of literary readers declined 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002, the gender protrusion in the share of literary readers (the difference between women's and men's shares of literary readers) has been larger than 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002. In 2002, the gender protrusion was 17.5 percentage points!

Reading at Risk emphasizes the tremendous public importance of literary reading. In the preface to the report, Dana Gioia, Chairman of the NEA, declares:

print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that makes complex communication possible. To lose such intellectual capability -- and the many sorts of human continuity it allows -- would constitute a vast impoverishment.
More than reading is at stake. As this report unambiguously demonstrates, readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life. The long-term implications of this study not only affect literature but all the arts -- as well as social activities such as volunteerism, philanthropy, and even political engagement.

The gender protrusion is literary reading is much larger than the decline in literary reading that the NEA and many concerned persons, including some who note various flaws in the NEA report other than the lack of interest in the impressive gender protrusion, have addressed. Why hasn't the awesome gender protrusion attracted widespread public interest, or at least concern, or at least notice?

The NEA's press release for Reading at Risk detumesces sex. The press release states:

Women read more literature than men do, but the survey indicates literary reading by both genders is declining. Only slightly more than one-third of adult males now read literature. Reading among women is also declining significantly, but at a slower rate.

The first independent clause of the first sentence has "women" as the subject and indicates that women lead men in the valued activity of concern. That sentence then has an attention-deflecting conjunction ("but" rather than "and") linking to a second independent clause indicating a similarity between the sexes. The second sentence returns to the idea of the first independent clause of the first sentence. It presents a statistic about "adult males." It does not, however, present the parallel statistic about "adult females." The third sentence returns to women and slightly qualifies the second clause of the first sentence. This disjoint prose structure doesn't convey what should be a major concern for those who truly believe that literary reading has great public importance: in 2002, 37.6% of men, in contrast to 55.1% of women, were literary readers.

Good literature is an antidote to conventional master narratives and narrow interests that obscure the continually new reality of the world. When it comes to men, failure of imagination may in fact indicate an imminent cultural crisis.

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Recent research indicates that human visual processing capabilities have shaped text. Letters in 96 non-logographic writing systems, Chinese characters, and natural scenes all have similar distributions of topological configurations. The human visual system evolved to process natural scenes. Writing systems from around the world and throughout the history of written language appear to be well-matched to the evolved visual capabilities of human beings.

This same research indicates that motor complexity of writing is less important than visual processing for reading in shaping the distribution of topological configurations. The frequency ranks of topological configurations in widely used writing systems are not significantly correlated with a measure of the motor effort required to produce the letter or character. Moreover, shorthand, which is designed to be written quickly, has a significantly different topological distribution of letters than does more widely used writing systems. Young children’s scribbles, which reflect relatively weak motor capabilities, also have a significantly different topological distribution than widely used writing systems. Within the space of relatively simple topological possibilities, motor complexity seems not to have strongly affected the design of writing systems.

This research suggests that the design of text favors reading over writing. That’s a plausible design orientation. The invention of text was probably oriented toward the market for memorializing events and storing knowledge. Those are communicative functions that involve writing that is read many times. Text messaging among family and friends is not that type of communication.

Text has other disadvantages as technology for personal communication. Compared to audible language, text has a relatively high bodily cost. Babies easily learn audible language. In contrast, the capability to read and write requires from humans a large, specialized investment in time and attention (schooling). Moreover, broad patterns of media use indicate that persons prefer spending time with audiovisual media than with text. This suggests that the marginal bodily processing cost of reading is higher than for audiovisual communication.

The design of text and the design of the human body disadvantage text messaging for presence-oriented, personal communication. Experts in the field assure me that their teen-aged daughters find great value in text messaging among their friends, value that voice communication does not provide. I respect this expertise. The research discussed above, however, at least indicates the importance of considering carefully how text messaging creates value relative to voice communication.

Addendum: The research on topological configurations in written languages is brilliant, pioneering research. Extensive discussion of the analysis and duplication of the findings would help to ensure that they are correct. I noticed that the analysis did not weigh topological configurations by frequency of use in representative text. Perhaps this wasn’t done because generating such weights might require considerable additional effort. I would like to see future research at least consider the significance of use weights.

The full citation for the research on topological configurations is:
Mark A. Changizi, Qiong Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo (2006), "The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes," American Naturalist, v. 167, pp. E117-E139.

Update: Included in Tangled Bank #54, hosted by Science and Politics. Check out that carnival for other interesting science posts.

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