Vanishing Male Writers: What The Data Shows

Michael Mohr Thinks Through the Gender Imbalance

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May 17, 2025

Dear Republic,

I promise, promise that there won’t be too, too many ‘vanishing male writer’ pieces, but it is a pleasure to have Michael Mohr — the hardest-working man on Substack — writing here, and Michael comes to this conversation armed with data and a theory.

-ROL

VANISHING MALE WRITERS: WHAT THE DATA SHOWS

The Controversy

Much has been made recently about the “vanishing” male writer, or, more juicily and perhaps pointedly, the vanishing white male writer. The New York Times had a piece out December 7^th, 2024 entitled, “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.” Jan 3, 2025 Vox had a hit piece called “Are Men’s Reading Habits Truly a National Crisis?: The Questionable Statistic at The Heart of the ‘Men Don’t Read Fiction’ Discourse.” March 21, 2025 Compact Magazine titled its essay, “The Vanishing White Male Writer.” April 3, 2025 Current Affairs followed with “The White Male Writer is Fine, I Promise.”

Writers on Substack weighed in. On December 15^th, 2024, Daniel Greenfield, who writes a Substack called Trajectories, published a piece titled “The Disappearance of Male Authors: Gen Z Doesn’t Have a ‘Book’ Problem, It Has a ‘Man’ Problem.”

I also can’t help thinking of

Alex Perez

’s September 29, 2022 interview in Hobart Magazine, where he pulled no punches, shocking readers by saying the unsayable: That book publishing had gone too far to the progressive left and there was no more place for serious male authors (especially white ones) attempting to pen genuine stories.

From Perez:

I think every guy who writes from a heterosexual male point of view feels the pressure to apologize for his manhood. First, let’s define masculine writing, since we’ve mentioned it a handful of times. Masculine writing=writing about heterosexual male concerns from a non-feminist point of view. It doesn’t mean that the masculine writer can’t be a feminist or write about feminism or whatever, but he can’t care about not being seen as a feminist or an ally, which is the main concern of most male writers now...If a man is worried about what feminists will think of him, he’s not a masculine writer because he’ll never be able to write honestly about the male condition. He will be the worst of all creatures: the mushy male feminist.

What We Actually Know

Based on data, it’s now universally agreed that, overall, women read more books than men. Also, women tend to specifically read more fiction (novels) than men.

Meanwhile, women pretty much dominate the book publishing world. Some will argue (this was Vox’s point) that men still make up top bestsellers, and most CEOs of book publishing companies are men and so, really, nothing has changed. But the reality is more complex as you get more granular.

Literary agents — which are the crucial bridge between writing a book and getting it published with a major publisher — are The Gatekeepers. As of now, according to the job information company Zippia, 58.5% of agents are women, against only 41.5% men. NPR stated this explicitly in a 2023 article titled, “Women Now Dominate the Book Business: Why There and Not Other Creative Industries?” and described “women surg[ing] ahead of men in almost every part of the industry in recent years.” Way back in 2016, the publisher Lee and Low Books carried out a study of 34 major book publishers, which showed that a mind-blowing 78% of the staff were female. (79% percent were white, 88% were straight.)

In 2012, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, roughly 54.6% of women read fiction, compared to 35.1% of men. By 2022, amidst a general decline in reading, female readers of fiction had dropped to 46.9%. Males had dropped to 27.7%. So there’s a clear gap of almost 20 percentage points that’s pretty consistent since roughly 2012.

At the same time, female authors have been steadily overtaking men. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, women authored 30% of published work in 1970 and produced the majority by 2020. I couldn’t find any direct polling on the specific question of whether the writing selected by contemporary publishers deprioritizes male stories, but having interned for a literary agent for nine months, having interacted with agents for over a decade, having looked over “manuscript wish lists,” the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming: progressive ideology is vastly overrepresented in American publishing compared to the general population and with the inevitable result that stories featuring men and written by men get short shrift.

If we extract from the data, the trend is clear. Publishing is dominated by young progressive white women who have a tendency to seek more books for, by, and about women like them. Since more women than men read books, and particularly novels, this makes sense economically. So to some extent this is just “capitalism” — aka the free market doing its thing.

But I don’t fully buy this. At this point we kind of run out of data and we find ourselves theorizing in two directions.

My Theory — Cherchez Les Gatekeepers

On the one hand, we simply are experiencing vast social changes. Over the past half-century, as women have gained more sexual and social freedom and have come to dominate in colleges and have ever-increasing power in the workplace, women have, in parallel, begun to dominate the publishing industry, with more women reading novels, writing novels, and working in publishing. In other words, what’s happening in publishing is an extension of a social change that’s happening everywhere. That makes sense and seems more or less irrefutable.

But there is an element to this which is not about the “free market” at all and is about the peculiarity of the publishing industry that it rests on gatekeepers who effectively control which products get to market. And that vast gap in female representation among agents (a 17-point swing) and among publishing industry staffers (a 50-point swing) can’t help but create bias and selectivity in what work makes the cut.

None of this should be particularly surprising. Wasn’t it the same thing happening up until the 1960s and ’70s but with male dominance? Most authors and readers back then were men. So the market up until 1970, roughly, worked against women, and agents would surely cater to the market, which, back then, were male books for male readers by male authors. (Generally speaking.)

But if we see the flaw in the structure pre-1970s, why can’t we see the same thing now? This opens up a bigger, deeper can of sociological worms. Men are behind in college attendance, MFA degrees, and with real wages falling relative to women’s. Shouldn’t we discuss how to rectify this problem? Instead what we generally seem to most often get is an eyeroll, which amounts to, Fuck you. Men had it all forever. It’s our turn. Men control everything and have all the power. Time for the Patriarchy to suffer.

But is this fair? If we’re going to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion — that weaponized term — shouldn’t that include men, and even, god forbid, WSM?

I’ve witnessed the transmogrification in the book world over the past 12, 15 years, which overlapped with my own writing life. In 2012 I had my first short story published in a little magazine. I was thrilled. I spent 15 years, on and off, working on my novel The Crew, rewriting, editing (including with a freelance former Random House editor), experiencing innumerable close calls with agents (I sent the novel to, all told, probably 250-300 agents over that span of time), including one agent who read the novel all the way through three times, claimed to love it, and then suddenly disappeared, and another agent who praised it but claimed that it would be hard to market the book because the protagonist was a middle-class WSM.

Now, look. I’m not claiming necessarily that my novel was rejected “because” I’m a man. Plenty of women get their novels rejected all the time. Most writers, in fact, get rejected by agents most of the time. An agent is incredibly hard to get. But when you look at the websites of top NYC literary agents and frequently find requests like the following, it is hard to not notice a pattern:

“She welcomes the surreal and is excited by fiction that explores gender, language, identity, built and natural environments, and/or systems of power in creative and compelling ways.”

“She writes about identity and youth through her experiences as a young Black woman, particularly focusing on genre fiction as a means to explore tropes otherwise dominated by white voices. Emily would particularly like to read stories by, for, and about marginalized creators who deserve the space to be messy, complicated, stubborn, in love, and celebrating joy.”

“She loves novels that subvert dominant cultural narratives and explore questions of identity, belonging, community, inheritance, and diaspora.”

The Dark and Dire Consequences

The bigger question here is this: What happens when men stop reading altogether? Shouldn’t we try offering men something appetizing that they actually want to read? If we’re largely excluding men from the cultural discourse as far as getting novels published, is that still following the mission of diversity, equity and inclusion? If so: How, exactly? What are the possible side effects of a society with very few or even no genuine male authors or readers of literature?

We already have much of the answer. Men broke for Trump—as well as, culturally speaking, for figures like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan. So if men feel more and more rejected by the feminism-dominated left, they’re going to move to the other side, because what other option do they have?

The solution might be, therefore, allowing men to write more honestly about their experience. That experience is almost certainly going to be not as progressive or not progressive at all, gritty, and filled with violent thoughts and ideas, inner and outer pain, the struggle to understand one’s own complex masculinity, and other topics that agents seem purposefully not to be looking for. Because there just might be a market for this kind of book. If more young men are breaking for Trump and Tate, etc, then wouldn’t it follow that a more honest, authentic male novel might do well? Publishing has always been left of center. I’m not suggesting it suddenly become conservative. What I’m saying is that it might be time for a more open-minded, honest approach.

Most new books “fail” commercially and sell very few copies, especially novels, so it’s always a risk. Book publishing is in fact an industry of chance and risk. You’re betting on readers you can’t fully rely on, particularly with a new author. This being the case, why not open the field more and let more men writing honest accounts of life from their perspective get their work out there?

Some authors have gotten through in recent years, such as

Andrew Boryga

, whose novel Victim is a brilliant, nuanced satire on identity. But most of us sit on the sidelines, either changing our writing to meet the New Left standards of political appropriateness, sticking to safer nonfiction, or else just continually circling through the agent rejection mill. Because maybe, just maybe, we want to write about most men’s actual contemporary lived experience. We’re mostly not allowed to even say the obvious in major outlets of cultural repute. How on Earth would we expect to get our books published?

All of these dynamics — this relentless feeling of exclusion — has opened the floodgates for alternative platforms like Medium and Substack, and of course self-publishing. Clearly, these represent the future of books. And in this regard I am hopeful, because there are no gendered and ideological gatekeepers in these forums. There are only readers, and an author’s direct relationship with them. This, slowly, is what seems to already be changing things. Some writers are gaining bigger audiences and making more money on Substack than they ever realistically could have from a traditionally published book. (Very close to zero people make an actual living through publishing books, traditionally or not.)

What we’re seeing in places like Substack are large, loyal followings for writers who question the status quo and who write about the “genuine American Male experience,” writers such as

, and many more.

My point is that it seems abundantly clear that there is a problem. Males really are being excluded, and the consequence of that is in part a turn towards the extreme — either towards work that lashes out or towards finding completely different modes of distributing writing. A great deal of that is the fault of the industry. At a minimum, book publishing could try to open the gates a little more and see what happens.

But maybe none of this matters now anyway. Like I said: Substack and self-publishing are the future.

Michael Mohr is a novelist, short story writer and essayist. Find his novels here. He's also been a developmental book editor since 2013. He currently lives in Madrid with his wife and three cats. Find his work (including a new novel he's serializing) on Substack at Sincere American Writing.

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