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The Pudding: Bias, She Wrote

How many best-selling books are penned by women? How has the figure changed over time, and how does it vary across genre? Writer Rosie Cima took data from The New York Times Best Seller list and created a series of eye-opening visualizations, accompanied by analysis. Her resulting essay was recently published on The Pudding, a "weekly journal for visual essays." As this essay reveals, while men outnumbered women on the bestseller list 3 to 1 in 1950, in 2001 that ratio was exactly 1 to 1. As Cima emphasizes (and as her charts illustrate), the number of women on the bestseller list has been "volatile" throughout the second half of the twentieth century, fluctuating wildly in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, the 1990s saw gains in terms of the number of women on the list. Why? As another series of charts illuminate, much of this change can be attributed to the declining popularity of "genre" fiction during the decade. Check out the full the essay to learn more.
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Date of Scout Publication
August 25th, 2017
Date Of Record Creation
August 24th, 2017 at 12:29pm
Date Of Record Release
October 17th, 2017 at 12:53pm
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