Are men being ‘pushed out of publishing’? Industry insiders discuss

Commentators are asking whether “men are being pushed out of publishing” amid discussion of groupthink, editorial turnover and the gender split of book-prize recipients.

BBC Radio 4 podcast AntiSocial explored this issue on Friday (18th July) following recent widespread social media discussion of an article published in March by the US journal Compact, The Vanishing White Male Writer.

The BBC programme, Are Men Being Pushed out of Publishing?, featured writers Gytha Lodge and Nick Tyrone alongside former Penguin Books communications director Amelia Fairney. The show was hosted by BBC journalists Adam Fleming and Lucy Proctor.

The speakers discussed the gender divide across the industry and in terms of book-buying. Proctor said: “Women are definitely dominating the buying of books – women make up 58% of the buying of books in the UK; this figure goes up just for fiction too.

“Women are also dominating the bestsellers list by quite a country mile: of the top 20 bestselling novels, 17 are written by women; one woman – Freida McFadden – has written five of them.”

Proctor also explained that many bestselling male novelists are well-known household names, such as Richard Osman and Bob Mortimer, and that, while women comprise two-thirds of the publishing workforce, only two of the five big publishers have female CEOs. 

Across literary prizes and media coverage, Proctor described an even gender balance. “Seven men have won [the Booker Prize] in the last 10 years compared to four women,” she said. “We also looked at the Observer’s influential debut novel list – in 2025 they had 11 people, with five men; in 2024 they had 10, five were men.”

Proctor added that two of the recent winners of the Nero Prize were male (Colin Barrett and Paul Murray), describing the awards as “pretty even stevens” in terms of gender. 

Tyrone disputed that the publishing gender ratio was evenly balanced. “What’s interesting from that perspective is the top male authors, such as Richard Osman and Bob Mortimer, are famous for other things than being an author…”

He also described well-established male authors being “grandfathered in”, having become successful decades ago, arguing that “they would have come in when the culture was different and their writing was in vogue”.

Tyrone added: “I think the culture in publishing at an editorial level – not at CEO but where you’re being signed, nurtured, talking about what the next book should be – is very, very female-dominated.”

Continues…