459433

2012

EJC27410.1177/0267323112459433European Journal of CommunicationVerboord

Article

Female bestsellers: A
cross-national study of
gender inequality and the
popularhighbrow culture
divide in fiction book
production, 19602009

European Journal of Communication

27(4) 395409
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/0267323112459433
ejc.sagepub.com

Marc Verboord

Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract
This article studies trends in gender inequality in the domain of fiction books between 1960 and
2009 in France, Germany and the United States by analysing bestseller lists and literary award
winners. It is argued that gender inequality is larger in fields or genres where more status is at
stake for individual agents, as this causes an influx of men who then edge women out of the
field. The study finds evidence for this mechanism, as the presence of female authors in bestseller
lists (exponent of the popular culture system) is larger than that among literary award winners
(highbrow culture system) in all three countries. Cross-national differences are consistent
(US smallest inequality, France largest), emphasizing the importance of field characteristics in
explaining social inequalities in cultural production.

Keywords
Bestseller lists, cultural production, fiction books, gender inequality, popular culture

Becoming successful in culture and entertainment is notoriously difficult because of the

infinite variety of the supply, fast-evolving criteria and tastes among experts and consumers, and, subsequently, uncertain demand (Caves, 2000). This seems to apply both to
artistic or symbolic forms of success e.g. critical acclaim, being consecrated by critics
(Allen and Lincoln, 2004) and commercial forms of success e.g. charting in bestseller

Corresponding author:
Marc Verboord, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, L3-119, PO Box 1738,
Rotterdam, NL-3000 DR, The Netherlands.
Email: verboord@eshcc.eur.nl

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European Journal of Communication 27(4)

lists (Dowd, 2004). Institutional agents involved in cultural production often claim to
make rational, empiricism-based or experience-based decisions, even though these are
merely rhetorical strategies to manage uncertainty and ambiguity (Bielby and Bielby,
1994). What is more, lack of clear-cut rules or guidelines on how to achieve objectives
also appears to facilitate biases and inequalities to enter the field. Social inequalities along
lines of class, gender and ethnicity have been found throughout the fields of cultural and
media production; resembling those in broader society and negatively affecting access,
work conditions and success of artists within cultural fields (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 5).
This article focuses on gender inequality in the field of book publishing or, in
broader terms, the literary field and addresses three issues. First, we aim to map how
gender inequality has evolved over time. In the past decades, western societies not
only have become more aware of gender discrimination, but also encouraged social
movements and issued policies to decrease the gap between men and women (cf.
Hausmann et al., 2010). The extent to which this trend is reflected in the domain of
culture is, as far as we know, not often examined (cf. Dowd et al., 2005). Second, we
contribute to the explanation of gender inequality by differentiating between two forms
of success. While commercial success as indicated by entries in bestseller lists is our
central object of analysis, this will be compared to artistic success by winning literary
awards. This differentiation can be traced back to the classic albeit maybe eroding
distinction between the popular culture system and the highbrow culture system
of cultural classification (cf. DiMaggio, 1991; Hesmondhalgh, 2006). Cultural classification systems can be described as the norms and practices applied to interpret, classify and value cultural products in a particular society. In general, the highbrow culture
classification system tends to emphasize symbolic aspects of value attribution, whereas
the popular culture classification system has traditionally focused more on material
success (popularity). This article argues that it is particularly the social status that such
classifications generate for both the classified (e.g. artists, genres) and the classifiers
(e.g. producers, media) which results in social inequalities within these systems.
Third, we introduce a cross-national perspective to account for as well as clarify the
impact of contextual factors (Livingstone, 2003). Most previous research on gender
inequality in the cultural industries addresses the United States or the United Kingdom.
Comparing the US with France and Germany not only details gender trends beyond the
Anglo-Saxon language area, but also offers the opportunity to assess the universality
or lack thereof of the mechanisms affecting gender inequality. Recent crossnational comparisons in cultural production have found that country differences often
emanate from field characteristics (e.g. Janssen et al., 2008; Kuipers, 2011; Lizardo
and Skiles, 2009).
The data in our analysis are the complete corpus of authors listed in bestseller lists of
(new) fiction books and the winners of the most prestigious literary awards from all three
countries for the period 19602009. Bestseller lists signal which authors are popular and
through weekly publication in the media, transmit such popularity ratings to audiences,
publishers, booksellers and other institutional actors in the field of book production.
Arguably, these lists do not necessarily supply sales measurements of scientific validity
(cf. Miller, 2000). Nevertheless the media industries increasingly rely on these lists when
they decide upon product development, release schedules, marketing and promotion, etc.

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(Anand and Peterson, 2000; Caves, 2000). Conversely, literary awards are among the
most prestigious vehicles of the highbrow culture system as they express artistic value,
are attributed by experts and comprise discrete events which are easily communicated to
audiences (English, 2005). How transformations in the status of popular culture and
highbrow culture systems (cf. Janssen et al., 2011) affect the position of female authors
over time has yet to be examined. Note that our analysis does not offer a strict test of
causal relationships at the individual level. Due to the longitudinal and aggregated nature
of our data and the difficulty of disentangling the time order of events, the analysis
focuses on charting developments in the success of female authors by juxtaposing the
aforementioned classification systems on a decade-by-decade basis. Thus, the main
objective of the research is to provide insight into long-term trends from a macro-level
perspective.

Gender inequality in the high culture and popular

culture field
The systematic marginalization of women in both production and performance practices
in the cultural and media industries has been demonstrated extensively in the past decades (cf. Bielby and Bielby, 1992, 1996; Ross and Byerly, 2004; Van Zoonen, 1994).
This gender gap concerns, for instance, inequalities in income (Bielby and Bielby, 1996
on film), commercial success (Dowd et al., 2005 on pop music), but also artistic prestige
(Showalter, 2010; Vos, 2008; Women in Publishing, 1987 on fiction books). In a similar
vein, the portrayal of women in cultural media products often tends to be highly traditional and stereotypical (e.g. Bayton, 1998; Lauzen et al., 2008; Van Zoonen, 1994).
Gender inequality thus seems to be present in various cultural genres and in different
manifestations. Nevertheless, social inequalities within fields of cultural and creative
production are often patterned via the structure as well as the status of the particular
fields or domains (e.g. Bielby and Bielby, 1992; Ross and Byerly, 2004). Many cultural
products are collective endeavours, bringing together creative, executive, commercial
and other agents in meticulous cooperations (Becker, 1982). Cultural fields are, however,
also loci for power struggles, as most individual agents continuously strive to increase
their own reputation in the field (Bourdieu, 1993; Curran, 2000). By taking part in activities that generate value whether this concerns symbolic production like writing reviews
or membership of award juries, or material production like creating bestsellers agents
can influence the norms they are otherwise subjected to. If particular social groups are
not being represented sufficiently in institutional settings, they lack influence, which is
then likely to negatively affect their chances of success.
These mechanisms are nonetheless to a large degree mediated by the position or
status that a particular genre has in the field, as was demonstrated by the seminal article
of Tuchman and Fortin (1984) on gender inequality in the literary field. Charting the
success of novelists in the period 18661917, they showed how the rise of the prestige
of the novel trading in its strong association with popular culture to highbrow culture
radically changed the position of female authors. Despite the fact that women dominated the profession of novelists up until then, men were better able to gain key positions
and subsequent recognition in this initially empty field thereby edging women out

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European Journal of Communication 27(4)

of the literary tradition.1 Male authors, for instance, more often engaged in writing
non-fiction (e.g. reviews, essays), judging manuscripts for publishers and editing
journals, which provided them with larger power to consecrate others. While this study
concerned 19th-century England, similar processes have been found for artistic success
in the mid- and late 20th-century Dutch literary field (Vogel, 2001; Vos, 2008), but also
for material success in the American movie and television industry in the late 20th century
(Bielby and Bielby, 1992, 1996). Outside the creative industries, status competition and
the masculine field logics this ensues, have been the topic of long-lasting debates on
news organizations and journalism at large (Ross and Byerly, 2004). In the cultural
field, already upon first selection in the field e.g. newspaper coverage of recent cultural output male artists are more likely to be selected than female artists (see Schmutz,
2009 for music; Verboord, 2011 for fiction books). Schmutz and Faupel (2010) point
out that such differences in recognition are highly correlated with diverging legitimating strategies in the discourse of cultural mediators. While male performers in the pop
music canon were predominantly legitimized in terms of a high-arts discourse, for
female performers critics emphasized notions of authenticity and owing success to
other established figures in the field.
Gender inequality thus seems stronger when the social status to be gained by institutional agents is perceived to be higher. Arguably this sets off a downward spiral in
which genres in which women are dominant in terms of production and consumption
like for example romance fiction have considerably lower artistic status in the
field (Radway, 1984). At the same time, popular culture became significantly more
legitimate in western societies from the 1950s onwards (Janssen et al., 2011). It is
increasingly recognized that popular culture plays an important role in the lives of
millions offering social commentary, alternative life perspectives and entertainment
(Van Zoonen, 2004). In terms of cultural classification, differences between highbrow
and popular culture are becoming smaller since the association of media and cultural
consumption with social exclusion is declining in current western societies (Bennett
et al., 2009; Peterson and Kern, 1996). So while we expect gender inequality to be
smaller in systems of popular culture production than in highbrow culture production,
it is likely to decrease over time due to popular cultures growing legitimacy.

Cross-national differences
Gender inequality differs significantly across countries, due to arrangements in education and labour market participation, political empowerment and cultural values
(Hausmann et al., 2010). This also applies to the countries studied here. Despite all being
modern western nations, they rank differently on the global gender gap index 2010:
Germany 13th (5th in 2006), the United States 19th (23rd in 2006) and France 46th (70th
in 2006). Note that these rank differences are attributed mainly because of smaller political empowerment to women in the latter two countries. No comparative research (that
we know of) exists on the representation of women in the literary fields or even broader
cultural industries in these countries. For the US, Greco et al. (2007) report a significant growth in female workers in the book publishing industry between 1982 and 2002
up to 60% of all employment. However, this mainly concerns the clerical area; in

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executive positions men are still overrepresented. Census occupation data from the
2000s show that although women outnumber men as professional authors and writers
(55%), they have consistently smaller median incomes (NEA, 2008: 122123). In
France, gender inequalities have been found for almost all artistic professions, including
writers (Coulangeon et al., 2005). What is more, the literary field seems particularly difficult to enter for female authors because of the persistent stereotyping of the femme
auteur (Naudier, 2002). For the German book sector, little information is available. In the
early 1970s in the beginning of the time frame of this article women are reported to
comprise about a quarter of the population of Schriftstellers (Fohrbeck and Wiesand,
1972: 82).
With little comparative and longitudinal work done previously, can we derive
expectations on cross-national differentiation in gender inequality of bestseller list
authors from the cultural/literary field perspective? Despite the increasing globalization of cultural production and consumption, countries still show significant differences in how their cultural fields are organized, leading to diverging symbolic and
material production practices (cf. Janssen et al., 2008; Lamont and Thvenot, 2000;
Lizardo and Skiles, 2009). Weber (2000), for instance, shows how publishers in France
more often draw upon criteria of literary value in their publishing decision process, in
contrast to American publishers, who emphasize commercial criteria more overtly.
More generally, these two countries are often thought to be cultural counter-poles with
regard to how they perceive popular culture and highbrow culture (Lamont and
Thvenot, 2000). Due to the historical importance of France in many cultural genres
among them literature cultural consecration, as described earlier, takes a prominent
position within its cultural field (Clark, 1979; Lamont, 1992). Governmental policy,
which for the past decades has aimed to protect highbrow French culture (lexception
culturelle in their own words), has only strengthened this tendency (Sapiro, 2009:
288ff.). The US lacks long cultural traditions, but has a history in which entrepreneurship and large-scale production are dominant also in the cultural domain (e.g. film
industry, record industry, book industry) (cf. Moran, 1997; Thompson, 2010). More
than in most European countries, and France in particular, the logic of commerciality
is firmly rooted in the US cultural field (Clark, 1979; Lamont, 1992). Germany is less
often considered in cross-national cultural comparisons. With France it shares a significant literary history, and a relatively strong focus on highbrow culture in, for
instance, the school curriculum (Bevers, 2005) and elite newspaper arts coverage
(Janssen et al., 2011). At the same time, Germany lacks a geographical literary centre
(like Paris in France) which confines the nationwide visibility of symbolic value attributions such as literary awards (Anheier and Gerhards, 1991).
Based on this existing research, we expect gender inequality to be the highest in
France and the lowest in the United States. In France, cultural classification places most
emphasis on highbrow culture and the literary field seems to be relatively difficult to
enter matching observations that women have relatively more difficulty in attaining
political empowerment in society at large. Although in the US, female authors still appear
to have weaker structural positions in the book market than men, their strong representation in popular culture genres is likely to benefit them in the commercialized American
literary field. Germany is expected to hold a position in the middle.

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European Journal of Communication 27(4)

Method
Data
Bestseller lists. The bestseller list data we analyse come from three sources: Der Spiegel
for Germany, LExpress from France and The New York Times for the United States.
These are the longest running bestseller lists in mainstream media in these countries.
We have collected all bestseller lists pertaining to fiction books published in the period
19652009 and for the US also for the years 19601964.2 While The New York Times
has published several fiction lists over the years, we restrict ourselves to hardcover
fiction, since these lists contain the books which are published most recently.3 It is
acknowledged that many popular fiction books have never been published in hardcover
editions, which might underestimate the presence of popular fiction authors. However,
as we expect American lists to show the lowest gender inequality, it actually makes the
test stricter than had we chosen lists of paperback or pocket book editions. Also, it
offers the opportunity to observe the consequences of an important transformation in
the American publishing sector: the hardcover revolution which increased the variety
of titles published in hardcover jackets and subsequently the economic relevance of this
edition type (Thompson, 2010: 3640). From being solely paperback writers, authors
of popular fiction could now compete on a more equivalent basis with literary authors
by also publishing in hardcover format.
All weekly editions of the aforementioned bestseller lists were retrieved in (electronic) archives and entered into a database.4 In the French bestseller lists we found 3568
titles of 1837 different authors, in the German lists 1659 titles of 889 authors and in the
American lists 3763 titles of 1506 authors.
We retrieved the sex of all authors in our database using both print and online reference works. As much as possible we tried to verify that female names indeed belonged
to female persons and male names to male persons by reading biographical texts and
inspecting authors pictures. In all countries we encountered malefemale combinations
for a single title which were left out of the analyses (12 in France, 7 in Germany and 14
in the US) as well as missing values due to lack of information (e.g. anonymous authors,
edited volumes) (respectively 6, 9 and 7).
All authors listed between 1970 and 2009 were classified into genre categories, based
on the oeuvre they have produced.5 For this purpose, again we rely on several reference
works and online sources. We distinguish between three categories: (0) literary fiction,
consisting of all authors deemed literary according to critics evaluations, descriptions
in reference works, etc.; (1) mainstream fiction, consisting of all authors who were not
classified as either literary or as one of the popular genres (e.g. writers of historical
sagas, humorous books, potboilers, which combine elements of both highbrow and
popular genres); and (2) popular fiction, consisting of typical genre fiction like thrillers,
detectives, romance novels, science fiction and fantasy novels. In the coding process,
mainstream fiction was considered the default category. Authors were attributed to the
other categories if we found explicit classifications or if book descriptions signalled typical properties associated with either the literary or the popular.6 If authors published
various types of genres during their careers, we choose the genre category present in the

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bestseller list. We did not find authors who entered the bestseller lists with more than one
of the three distinguished categories.
Literary awards. To examine gender inequality in the domain of highbrow culture, we
collected data on winners of the most important literary awards in France, Germany and
the US between 1960 and 2009. Literary awards are generally considered important acts
of symbolic value attribution (or cultural consecration) as they are (a) discrete forms of
valorization, (b) attributed by juries often consisting of legitimate institutional experts
and (c) publicly awarded to enhance the legitimacy of the consecrating act (English,
2005; Street, 2005). For each country, we selected awards with a national orientation that
seemed to be the most prestigious in the field according to reference works. Due to field
differences among countries, the number of awards per country varied, as did the number
of winners. The Appendix gives an overview of all selected awards.

Results
Mapping gender inequality of bestseller list authors
Table 1 first presents the percentage of female authors in bestseller lists between 1960
and 2009. In all three countries the proportion of female authors has increased over time,
though clear differences exist between countries. Overall, France has the lowest percentage of women in its bestseller lists: in the late 1960s about 17% of all titles are written
by a female author and this increases to a percentage slightly over 30% in the 2000s. In
the German bestseller lists the share of titles by female authors grows from 24% in the
late 1960s to 40% in the 2000s. The American bestseller lists contain the most women:
already in the 1960s about a quarter of all listed authors are female, and in the 2000s their
share has risen to 47% of all titles. Interestingly, only in the German lists do we observe
a steady growth over the decades. In the US, the percentage of women entering the lists
seems to slow down in the 1970s and 1980s, before the spurt of the 1990s and 2000s sets
in. Looking at the trend line of unique authors (instead of titles) shows a clearer picture:
the 1980s already saw more different names of women on the list, yet they tended to
chart with fewer titles. In France, the great leap forwards occurs between the 1970s and
1980s. In the latter decade, France is on a par with the other two countries. However, in
the 1990s and 2000s the proportion of female writers stagnates.
Is there a difference in the amount of success in the lists between men and women?
Examining the number of weeks that men and women stay on the chart does not reveal
significant differences. Only in the US, the average number of weeks spent on the list is
consistently, but not significantly, larger for men than for women since the 1970s.
In Table 2 we turn to the comparison with the highbrow culture system of literary
awards. Here we have complete information on the 1960s for all three countries at our
disposal. At that time, the gender gap in winning awards is almost equally large in France,
Germany and the US: only 1619% of the winners are female. Note that for France this
means that women were slightly more successful in the highbrow domain than in the
popular (bestseller) domain. The country patterns diverge considerably in the later decades. In the French literary award system women never surpass their 1960s share: gender

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European Journal of Communication 27(4)

Table 1. Proportion of female authors in French, German and American bestseller lists,
19602009.
FRA

GER

US

% Females

Weeks
in list

% Females

Weeks in
list

% Females

Weeks in
list

Tit

aut

tit

aut

tit

aut

19601964
19651969
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
Total
N
2
F (decade)
F (sex)
F (decade*sex)

n.a.
16.8
18.7
30.8
33.0
31.1
28.8
3568
57.6*

n.a.
15.5
20.2
31.4
32.1
31.4
27.9
1837
35.2*

n.a.
10.6
17.3
16.5
17.0
18.8
16.6

n.a.
13.5
17.4
17.8
14.7
19.5
17.1

n.a.
23.7
25.1
30.6
36.6
39.7
34.3
1659
34.2*

n.a.
23.1
28.7
30.4
36.6
37.7
33.2
889
17.9*

n.a.
25.2
39.8
39.3
40.1
27.2
33.5

n.a.
20.8
27.5
44.6
49.5
34.5
37.1

24.7
28.2
26.0
28.1
38.8
47.0
38.1
3763
144.2*

24.2
25.5
28.2
33.3
37.8
45.8
35.8
1506
52.5*

18.8
26.1
33.7
32.0
26.5
18.8
25.4

2.1
0.1
0.4

2.4*
0.04
0.71

20.4
27.5
28.4
24.6
23.6
16.1
21.2

20.6*
0.05
0.50

Notes: % females is calculated for the title file (authors with unique titles) and the author file (containing
unique authors). Significance weeks in list tested for author file with Ancova (malefemale combinations
left out).
Significance: * = p < .05.

Table 2. Proportion of female authors among French, German and American literary award
winners, 19602009.
FRA

GER

US

Total winners

% Female

Total winners

% Female

Total winners

% Female

1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
Total
2

93
104
115
134
132
578

17.2
10.6
17.4
17.2
15.9
15.7
2.7

74
86
123
116
128
527

16.2
14.0
22.8
19.8
28.1
21.1
7.8

32
44
92
124
102
394

18.8
29.5
31.5
30.6
30.4
29.7
2.1

Significance: * = p < .05.

inequality remains amazingly large. In Germany we see strong fluctuations in the

number of female award winners. The peak of 28%, however, is found in the most recent
decade, suggesting that there is a positive trend. The US, again, show the smallest gender
inequality, as overall 30% of the award winners are female. Still, this percentage is
already achieved in the 1970s and has not altered much since.

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These results confirm our expectations regarding cross-national differences as well as

the popularhighbrow divide. Gender inequality is smallest in the US and largest in
France; both for bestseller lists and award winners. This strongly suggests that fieldspecific properties indeed affect social inequalities in cultural production. At the same
time, the gender gap is consistently smaller in the popular culture system (bestsellers)
than in the highbrow culture system (literary awards). This result thus implies that (sub)
fields in which more status is at stake are indeed more subject to social inequalities than
those offering less status.
In Table 3 we analyse the highbrowpopular divide within bestseller lists to examine
whether changes in gender inequality as observed in Table 1 can be interpreted in terms
of changing genre distributions. The table itemizes the total proportions of female and
male authors in the 1970s and 2000s, as well as the difference between the two, in the
genre categories of literary fiction, mainstream fiction and popular fiction. Since the
presented figures are total percentages, this table also gives insight into the importance
of genres across countries. Clearly, French bestseller lists contain the most in literary
fiction and the least in popular fiction, while in the US this is the other way around and
Germany holds a middle position.
This overall orientation is reflected in the explanation of gender differences. In the
European countries, most of the increase of female authors can be attributed to literary
fiction, whereas in the US the bulk of new female authors write popular fiction. In more
detail, Table 3 informs us that in France the growth rate of female authors amounted to
11.3%; 6.3 points of which can be attributed to literary fiction and 5.3 points to popular
fiction. Similarly, the German growth rate of 8.9% can be unravelled into 5.0 points for
literary fiction, 2.9 points for popular fiction and 0.9 points for mainstream fiction. In the
US, where the rise in female authors was considerably larger (18.1%), literary fiction and
mainstream fiction account for about 3.5 points and popular fiction for more than 11
points. Again, these results point to the importance of field characteristics in explaining
social inequalities: in the fields of France and Germany, where there is a longer tradition
of a highbrow culture system, the inflow from popular culture is smaller than in the US.
Table 3. Gender distributions in bestseller lists per genre between 1970s and 2000s.
FRA (N = 1612)

GER (N = 791)

US (N = 1232)

1970s

Growth

2000s

1970s

Growth

2000s

1970s

growth

2000s

Females total
Literary
Mainstream
Popular
Males total
Literary
Mainstream
Popular

20.3%
8.5%
9.5%
2.3%
79.7%
35.1%
38.4%
6.2%

+11.3
+6.3
0.3
+5.3
11.3
+4.7
25.0
+8.6

31.6%
14.8%
9.2%
7.6%
68.4%
39.8%
13.7%
14.8%

29.3%
7.9%
11.4%
10.0%
70.7%
27.9%
24.3%
18.6%

+8.9
+5.0
+0.9
+2.9
8.9
+3.5
12.9
+0.5

38.2%
12.9%
12.3%
12.9%
61.8%
31.4%
11.4%
19.1%

28.2%
5.0%
10.5%
12.7%
71.8%
23.2%
19.3%
29.3%

+18.1
+3.4
+3.6
+11.1
18.1
12.0
9.6
+3.5

46.3%
8.4%
14.1%
23.8%
53.7%
11.2%
9.7%
32.8%

Notes: The table is based on the author file. The percentages are total percentages. The overall percentages
differ slightly from those in Table 1 due to missing values for genre.

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European Journal of Communication 27(4)

Conclusion and discussion

This article has examined trends in gender inequality in the literary fields of France,
Germany and the United States between 1960 and 2009, with special attention to the
highbrowpopular culture divide. Central to our analysis was the presence of female
authors in one exponent of the popular culture system weekly fiction book bestseller
lists which we compared to one exponent of the highbrow culture system literary
award attribution. Our longitudinal analysis clearly showed that over time female authors
have become increasingly successful in bestseller lists, albeit they remain underrepresented in all three countries. In the US, women comprise about 45% of all listed authors
in the 2000s, but in both European countries they remain under 40%. Yet these proportions are considerably smaller for literary award winners: no more than 30% of the
awards are won by women in the US and Germany, while in France women comprise
less than one-fifth of all winners. Gender inequality thus appears to be larger in the highbrow system than in the popular system, and this does not change over time.
To a certain extent, the rise of female authors in bestseller lists can be related to the
growing presence of popular culture in these lists. In general, the shares of literary fiction
and mainstream fiction have become smaller since the early 1970s, whereas popular
genres (thrillers, science fiction/fantasy and romance books) have started to dominate the
charts. In the US in particular, women seem to have benefitted most: while more female
authors have entered the bestseller lists among all genres, their increase is disproportionally higher among the popular genres. Again, this finding emphasizes the intermediating
role of genre: popular culture has the strongest emancipatory effect in fields where the
highbrowpopular divide is the weakest. This corroborates and extends the argument
that in prestigious cultural fields women are edged out (Bielby and Bielby, 1996;
Tuchman and Fortin, 1984) since our analysis explicitly compared genres of different
status. Nevertheless, follow-up research might examine the internal differentiation in
popular fiction more closely. An explorative look at American bestseller lists, for
instance, shows that relatively many female authors only achieved bestseller success
after switching from writing romance fiction to writing thrillers (e.g. Tami Hoag, Lisa
Jackson, Linda Howard), suggesting that status differences among genres are also relevant within the popular culture system. It would also be relevant to study the role of the
book format (hardcover, paperback, pocket) therein, as many popular fiction authors first
seem to build a fan basis within the paperback or pocket segment before becoming successful in the hardcover segment where new books by star authors are first released.
A final important result of the article is the persistent direction of cross-national differences, emphasizing the importance of field characteristics in explaining social inequalities. Clearly, France is overall the least receptive to female authors of fiction and the
US is the most. France is also the country in which, through tradition and institutional
conventions, the highbrow culture system (e.g. importance of literature, literary awards)
has the strongest position within the literary field. In the US, the literary field seems to
rely mostly on a market logic (Weber, 2000), which balances artistic and economic legitimacy and decreases gender inequality. These findings cannot be qualified as final, however. More in-depth analyses of how agents within literary fields (publishers, reviewers,
readers) engage in processes of decision-making and how this affects social inequality

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seem necessary to illuminate the mechanisms hypothesized in this article. This would
also shed more light on the issue of causality. Since we used aggregated data in this
study, it was not possible to assess how status in the field impacts success within persons,
by disentangling the time order of events.
Future research could also elaborate by examining other genres (e.g. popular music
versus classical music) or institutions, the output of which offers more insight into how
female artists are perceived and subsequently classified (e.g. reviews in the media). Both
approaches should take into account the transformations that take place in the cultural
industries and fields. What does it mean, for instance, that the reading of fiction books
has increasingly become a leisure time activity of women (Griswold, 2008; Tepper,
2000)? And whereas traditionally print media have played a pivotal role in the literary
field via book reviews, this may have altered due to the rise of entertainment media, peer
production practices on the Internet and the more omnivorous consumption practices of
consumers (e.g. Verboord, 2010).
Another important development is the increasing diversification of cultural classification practices, which has produced, among other things, women-only prizes (e.g. Orange
Prize for Fiction Books in the UK), but also awards which seem to intersect the popular
highbrow divide (e.g. high-status awards in the field of popular culture, like the Mercury
Music Prize in the UK). Also, within highbrow fields, opinions of audiences seem to
become more important in the attribution of awards (e.g. Grand Prix des Lectrices de
Elle; Prix des Libraires). If women make up larger proportions of these audiences, this
could thus have considerable influence on gender inequality within the field. In this current article it was not feasible to consider the impact of such developments, but it is
recommended that follow-up studies examine this in more detail.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tonny Krijnen, the members of the ERMeCC paper seminar, and the anonymous EJC reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Funding
This research was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research as part of
the VICI-project Cultural Classification Systems in Transition (NWO-project 277-45-001).

Notes
1. The consequences for canon formation have been mapped both by literary scholars (cf.
Showalter, 2010) and social scientists (cf. Corse and Westervelt, 2002).
2. The bestseller list in Der Spiegel only started in October 1961; for LExpress we only have
information as from January 1965.
3. This choice was made to have optimal comparability across countries: for Germany and
France no paperback lists are available. We acknowledge that these bestseller lists do not
probably represent the full spectrum of outlets (they are likely to represent mainly traditional
book stores and overlook sales at other outlets like supermarkets, kiosks, etc.). Yet, we argue
that this will then provide an even stronger test of the central hypothesis.

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4. No adjustments were made for the size of the lists which grew in the European countries from
top 10s to top 20s, and in the US from top 10s to top 15s since we are interested in all authors and
titles to which audiences are exposed. In France, at some time points (19651975, 19881990)
the lists were joint compilations of fiction and non-fiction. Between 1965 and 1975 we collected
all data and then excluded the non-fiction books in the data analysis. For the brief period between
1988 and 1990, when a mixed top 30 was published, we extracted a fiction top 15.
5. Genre categories were retrieved at the author level, since most authors publish their titles
within the same genre category. Also, the large number of unique titles as well as the limited
availability of information on old titles made it practically impossible to analyse the title level.
For the same reason, we disregarded the pre-1970 period.
6. More specifically, a three-fold strategy was used. First, we looked for explicit classifications
by critics and journalists in bi(bli)ographies (e.g. literature, thriller author or policier).
If these classifications were not available, we looked for more implicit classifications such
as winning prizes in a category matching the genre classification, being reviewed in certain
newspaper rubrics or websites, or being linked to certain genres through the similar products
suggestions on Amazon.com. This would for instance distinguish a historical novel such as
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (which won the Booker Prize) from the historical sagas by James
Michener (which critics generally considered too stereotypical for winning literary awards). A
final strategy mostly used for less-known authors from the 1970s concerned interpretation
of book descriptions together with book covers as found on the Internet. Whereas literature is
often associated with innovative use of language and more complicated themes, popular fiction generally follows certain institutional conventions within a genre (e.g. thrillers emphasize
crime and murder mysteries; romance novels emphasize romantic encounters often between
women and men). Again, authors without such characteristics were classified as mainstream.

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Appendix
Table A1. List of literary awards used in the analysis.
Countries

Names of awards

United States

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; National Book Award; National Book Critics
Circle Award; PEN/Faulkner Award; Howells Medal; Los Angeles Times Book
Prize; National Jewish Book Award; American Academy of Arts and Letters
Gold Medal; Hemingway/PEN Award; Dos Passos Prize; Sue Kaufman Prize;
Lannan Award
Prix Goncourt; Prix Fmina; Prix Renaudot; Prix Mdicis; Prix Interalli;
Grand Prix du Roman; Grand Prix de Littrature; Grand Prix de
Littrature Paul Morand; Prix des Deux Magots; Prix Roger Nimier;
Prix Novembre/Decembre; Prix de Meilleur Livre tranger; Prix Mdicis
tranger; Prix Fmina tranger

France

Germany

Georg-Bchner-Preis; Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels;

Deutsche Buchpreis; Bremer Literaturpreis; Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis;
Heinrich-Heine-Preis; Kleist-Preis; Heinrich-Mann-Preis; Hermann-HessePreis; Heinrich-Bll-Preis; Nelly-Sachs-Preis; Friedrich-Hlderlin-Preis;
Hans-Fallada-Preis; Deutscher Kritikerpreis; Grosser Literaturpreis der
Bayerischen Akademie der Schnen Knste/Thomas-Mann-Preis

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