The Lack of Visibility of Female Authors in the awarding of literary prizes
Are women disadvantaged in the literature industry? Or maybe we just write worse than men and are therefore rightly underrepresented in the literary canon?
Numbers are known to speak for themselves. For this reason, under the motto #COUNTING WOMEN by various networks and committed journalists, data will be presented showing how often women are valued compared to men in the literary world, how often they sit in juries, who recounts who and how often.
As a gentle introduction, I have regarded the Bachmann Prize and counted winners, runners-up, nominees and jury members since its founding in 1977. A prize named after an outstanding author will, of course, present women's literary texts with equal rights from the very beginning, so my expectation.
Unfortunately it was disappointed. In the first few decades, drastically male dominated juries nominated mostly male authors. However, over the past two decades, with a more balanced gender balance in the juries, this trend has weakened, and since 2012, female authors have consistently made up at least half of the nominees. So something is changing. So, it can not be a result of the quality - as provocatively put above - if women still have a harder time in literary business.
Despite the positive trend, it should be noted that in none of the above categories women are equally represented or even more strongly represented than their male counterparts. How it looks like at the German Book Prize and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, coming soon.
Here the numbers: