In March (2009-03-23), we looked at studies which seemed to indicate that men read far fewer books than women do. NPR (2007) reported on an AP/Ipsos survey that found that the typical American had read only 4 books in 2006. The same NPR article suggests that the Harry Potter series might have made an impact on the reading gap, according to a Scholastic survey: "Sixty-one percent [of boys] agreed with the statement 'I didn't read books for fun before reading Harry Potter,' compared with 41 percent of girls.".
The relationship between reading skill and reading for pleasure appears to be strong: Chiu and McBride-Chang (2006) found that girls outscored boys on reading comprehension tests across 43 countries. However, reading enjoyment mediated 42% of the gender difference, suggesting that girls may be better readers because they enjoy reading more.
Reading is awesome. This is not the post I meant to write today, and so I don't feel like I'm prepared to talk about this. I got completely sidetracked by the NPR article. Um. I read a lot as a kid, and I never really feel like I have enough time for reading as an adult. I tend to read more in summer, because it's something I can do outside. I was going to talk about the split between male and female authors, but the BBC article I was going to cite has gone missing somewhere...
I do feel like reading skill and reading enjoyment is sort of chicken and egg. Are girls better at it because they enjoy it more, or do they enjoy it more because it's not as hard?
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2 comments:
ukelele
2009-05-22 11:45 am
The librarians at the (all boys) school where I used to teach were always having issues with trying to get boys to read more. It seems like, while girls are perfectly happy to read books with male protagonists, the reverse is much less true (sigh), and it seems like boys' genre preferences are more limited (why? dunno), so it's harder to find books that boys will want to read. (And the books that are *assigned* may not be interesting to boys. And elementary teachers are overwhelmingly female, so -- talking out my ass here -- their genre preferences may not match on average with the boys', and little boys are a lot less likely to see men reading.)
Anyway. If you have problems finding books that *appeal* to you, you're not going to read for pleasure, regardless of skill level. (And then a skill gap will grow, since you're not practicing. And this'll be compounded if you associate "books" with "boring things people make me read in school".) Our librarians did do a great job finding books that the boys *did* want to read, but a lot of them are outside the traditional canon, Newbery & Caldecott lists, etc., which means that they tend to face popular resistance/derision when people try to use them in the curriculum (graphic novels are a big example here).
Boys also seem overwhelmingly more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities; insofar as this reflects an underlying disparity in LD frequency rather than some other factor (e.g. boys who act out getting diagnosed while girls who space out don't), that's also going to impact gendered differences in pleasure reading -- reading may well not be fun if you're, e.g., dyslexic.
differenceblog
2009-05-23 12:00 pm
It seems like, while girls are perfectly happy to read books with male protagonists, the reverse is much less true I don't think that's coincidental. That seems like a symptom of the whole "male default" social structure. Everyone is supposed to be able to identify with the white, male protagonists because *there's nothing unusual about them*. Women are somehow a "minority", despite making up more than half the population. This bothers me, and I probably got sidetracked from a more important point in your comment because of it.
::reads::
There may be an issue with genre preferences, but I'm not sure how much of it is gender-related. I feel like adults in general are spectacularly bad at predicting how children think -- remember being a kid and reading books with child protagonists? Remember how stilted and weird most of the child characters in books were?
Also: when so many of the authors on the Newbery-award list are male, how can they miss the boy's preferences so widely, if this is a gender thing. According to a 2008 article in Bloomberg, Newbery-book protagonists are disproportionately white, male, and come from two parent households.
And here's the Guardian (2005) article I couldn't find yesterday, which claims that women read books by men and women, but men only read books by men. Something to think about - do boys move on from not reading female characters to not reading female authors? Or are male authors even writing female characters?
Which leads into another question of the male default: how many times have you heard a male author asked how he writes women so well? Or heard complaints that a male author can't write women? And how many times have you heard a female author asked how she writes men so well? I can think of several examples of the first two instances, but there seems to be an assumption that everyone understands men - even among men.
I don't know. I think it's complicated, certainly, and that it may be harder to get boys excited about reading than girls. Do they need to be as good at it? Are we reaching minimum levels of acceptable literacy? I'd argue not.
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