Joel Waldfogel

This is Today Explained. My name is Joel Waldfogel, and I'm a professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. I also have a connection with the economics department here.

I'm not a big fiction reader.

Well, I have been in my life. I have been, of course, in my life. I did a big project after I finished college. I decided I really wanted to read through the important pieces of American literature. So I have been a big reader. But lately, I consume other forms of creative output. Let's put it that way. That's an economist way to say it.

You know, that's true. I'm enjoying the fruits of the digital renaissance. That's how I would put it.

Yeah, sure. I spent some time at the copyright office as the Kamenstein fellow there. And one of the things they were interested in was what's happened to the share of copyrights that have been granted to women. And so I was looking at that and how it's really grown substantially over time. One of the big categories of copyrights, the one that people are most familiar with, is books.

And it's remarkable just how the share of copyrights granted to females has risen from really low numbers, if you go back 50 years, to more than 50%. It really passed 50% about five years ago. And that's an unusual kind of statistic, because when you look at other creative or innovative areas, you just don't see that level of balance, that level of female participation relative to male.

I can go back to the early 19th century. I can look at the card catalog of the Library of Congress, biggest library in the world. And by looking at the names of authors, I can infer the gender of authors. And back in 1800, about 5% of the books published who were written by women. And it rose very slowly over the 19th century. By 1900, it was still something like 10%.

And it continued to rise very slowly into the mid-20th century. And only at about 1970 did it do almost literally a hockey stick. That is, the female share just quickly rose from something like 15 to something like, well, by 2015 or so, over 50%. So it's really a remarkable transition that's happened fairly recently.

Well, I think a lot of it is female college going. So if you look at the share of women going to college, that's really when it bumps up. And so that means both that we have a bunch of women in a position to write, as well as a bunch of women who are likely to be people wanting to buy books. So it's both the supply side and the demand side.

But I really think it's taking a lot of women and think about the social change of the 20th century that really liberated women in many ways to participate in various kinds of economic activity, one of which is writing books.

Well, surely there are. I mean, it's interesting. If you go back early in the century, there were fairly prominent examples, very prominent examples of very successful women authors. So I don't know that – it's not an alien thing to read Virginia Woolf or something. So there have been in the bestseller list a lot of women even back as early in the 20th century.

But I think what's interesting to me is that this increase in female authorship, it occurs across all genres of production. So it's not just fiction. It's all kinds of nonfiction. So women are really becoming more involved in the production of all kinds of books.

Well, it's hard to say, you know, because I look at enormous numbers of books. And so there's sort of like the publishing industry has, I think, historically been very an elitist industry. And there's sort of a high echelon of the fancy publishers. And then there are many, many other kind of echelons of books. And by recently, you know, there's an enormous amount of self-publishing.

And so it might be – it's entirely possible that there are barriers and challenges maybe historically for women at the kind of the high end. But there have been since 1970 I think a lot of ways to get published and especially since 2010 or so when people could begin to self-publish.

That's really true. And it's both an absence of gatekeepers and also really the production process to be a vulgar economist. It just involves me and a pencil or me and a laptop or somebody, not me. I'm male, I guess. But anybody, whereas with music or with movies or with television, it requires a fair bit more coordination and sometimes capital investment and therefore gatekeepers.

Although having said that, you know, since digitization, All of these industries, it's become much easier to enter. But still, writing is literally solitary. I just have to coordinate with myself. I can do it maybe in spare time. Even if I have a kid or something, you know, if I have a lot of family obligations, I could still maybe find time to do it.

So it is interesting the way writing, unlike some of the other activities, is available to people regardless of the constraints on their time.

There are some kind of stereotypical patterns that are true. So, for example, a lot of the romance novels are both written by women and read by women. And there are other categories that are more historically male in their writing and probably in their reading. But that said, what I find really interesting is that there's growth in the female share writing in all of the categories.

Well, it literally isn't. One answer is in some sense it has to crowd it up. But let me just tell you some facts. There just has been very big growth in the number of new works by men. just bigger growth in the number of new works by women.

Now, if I'm going to be kind of an eggheaded economist about it, you know, we could say, well, if the women hadn't increased, would the men have grown even more? And maybe, maybe, but it's not as though there's been like an absolute decline in the number of books by men. There's been a big increase by men and a bigger increase by women.

Well, it's hard to say. I mean, in some sense, all sorts of books, regardless of genre and author type, have been increasing. And that's true in all the creative industries. There's just a greater variety of everything. That said, I think literary types tend to focus on the prestige publishers. And there could well be trends at the prestige publishers that are focusing more on women. I don't know.

So I'm not denying the perspective of people who think that some of these voices aren't being, let's say, promoted or launched into the industry. at the same echelons they used to be. What I think is true, though, is that there are enormous opportunities for everybody to get some work out there. Every sort of book has experienced increase in the number of works being created.

We've worried, I think, we as a society for a long time that we're not getting innovation out of everybody. Not everyone is allowed to participate in the innovative process, and maybe we're missing out. So there's this expression, lost Einsteins or lost Marie Curies. And again, go back to 1800, only 10% of books or 5% are written by women. Women aren't really participating.

Maybe there are a bunch of women with great ability that we're just not tapping into. And one way to think about this study of mine is, well, let's look at this long swing of time where we go from not using women to using women as much as we use men to create this stuff. And it turns out that that's enormously valuable.

It's not just, for example, women who are benefiting as consumers, although that would be great. It's also men. So this is like a win-win kind of innovation or creation. And so I think it augurs well for how important it might be to get everybody involved.

This is Today Explained.

Congratulations first. Thank you. National Book Award. It's the first time I've been happy in two months, these last two days.