Thursday, April 2, 2009

Male Versus Female Reading Habits

As reported in the Telegraph, a new study of reading habits showed "almost half of women are 'page turners' who finish a book soon after starting it." The same can be said for only 26% of men. Also, readers who take a long time to finish a book and only read one or two books per year are "twice as likely to be male than female." Lastly, male readers are more likely than female readers to be burdened by "shelves full of books that have never been opened."

These differences make a lot of sense considering women read significantly more fiction than men. As reported by NPR:
When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain.

2 comments:

bermudaonion said...

I'm not surprised that women read more than men, but I am surprised by how large the gap is.

Meytal Radzinski said...

There are a lot of interesting comments to this article on the Guardian's blog. People raised some very good points about the many variables in this kind of survey and how it might not be particularly accurate. Meanwhile, there are a lot of factors that must be taken into account. Many things need to be defined in order to better under the situation... I don't think it's quite as simple as "women read more than men".