Does women's fiction get the respect it deserves?

It would seem that now is a fine time to be a female writer of fiction. An estimated 60 percent of book purchases are made by women, who tend to favour their own gender. Wander into any writers' festival, anywhere in the world, and it will be populated primarily by women, probably women who belong to book clubs. Creative writing classes are overwhelmingly the preserve of women. The winners of 10 of the past 15 New Zealand Book Awards books of the year were women.

Without question, writing by women is in rude good health, and yet… There is a problem, ladies, a pinkwash, a yawning disconnect between the writing that women are doing and the respect that it garners. Not so much at the literary end of the spectrum (although there are issues there which we will get to shortly) but certainly at the commercial end, where writers of popular, female-centric fiction find themselves stuck in a rosy-glow ghetto scattered with baskets of flowers, frilly dresses and mournful glances.

Partly this is because women's writing often concerns domestic issues: family, feelings, the life of the home, says Wellington writer and critic Anne Else. "The idea that private life is a great deal less important persists because it's still possible for men to devote their lives to what they see as important in the wider world, with a bit of private life on the side that they can take or leave when they feel like it."

"Chick lit" as a put down

This is reflected in the way fiction written for women is packaged and sold. Else, like every writer approached for this story, has a strong distaste for the term 'chick lit', which is seen as dismissive, derogatory and just too damn cute. She had a row with her local library about their display of 'chick lit' books. "I told them I wouldn't mind them having a sign for chick lit as long as they also had a sign for dick lit, which would be perfectly fair, but as they didn't could they please take it down — and actually they did take it down."

What was especially annoying about the whole thing is that in addition to genuine examples of the genre, the label was applied incorrectly to "pleasant books about women" which had more serious intent than to simply entertain, says Else, who also grits her teeth when reading reviews of books by women. "There's almost an implied sense of, 'Oh, wow, this is really good and it's not chick lit'." She hastens to add that this most often happens when she reads the London Review of Books, but as we are increasingly a global culture, that matters here just as much as in the United Kingdom or United States, where fiction categories are strictly applied. "Discrimination comes in column inches," says Else.

"In general what women write about is not regarded as serious," agrees Carole Beu, owner of the Women's Bookshop in Auckland. "But that's not just literature, that's in the whole of society. Men talk serious talk and women gossip, I mean it's just nonsense. And that goes into literature, that what men write must be more serious because they're men, and people are unaware [they're doing it], it's unconscious."

Some female writers are more equal than others

There are the notable exceptions to this rule, Beu points out. Margaret Atwood. Barbara Kingsolver. Alice Munro. Writers of such reputation that they could write on any topic under the sun – including domestic dramas, which they do write – and readers would give their work serious consideration. "They're almost seen as apparitions," says Beu, who has spent her whole career trying to redress the imbalance. Every five years the Women's Bookshop organises a survey, ranking the top 50 books by women in the past 50 years. Eleanor Catton, Patricia Grace and Janet Frame were the highest ranked New Zealand authors in the most recent survey.

Other local writers to make the list over the years include Keri Hulme, Fiona Kidman, Elizabeth Knox and Jenny Pattrick, with Pattrick the most commercially successful of the group with her series of historical novels set in Denniston. Although regarded as a fine writer, Pattrick's popularity puts her in a category of her own.

"I think when it comes to commercial fiction it is a whole different ballgame and women writers are not served as well or given the status," says Catherine Robertson, a Wellington novelist and book reviewer. "Nick Hornby is taken seriously as a writer although he writes humorous domestic fiction. If he was a woman he would be marketed as chick lit and his books would have girly covers and he would never have got to the status that he has. I love him dearly and I love the writing, but I know that there are some absolutely excellent, intelligent, amusing female writers who write about exactly the same things and they do not get that kudos."

Bad book cover art

Robertson is the author of three bestselling novels known for their humour, an element which has smoothed the path to publishing in Germany and Italy but has its drawbacks too.

"The minute you are writing funny books about domestic situations you are immediately put into the chick lit genre, there's no other genre for you," she says, laughing at the cover conventions for books marketed to women. "There's no point being frustrated with the limitations of how books are marketed. But when it comes to cover design, there is the distinction that is not doing female writers any favours." The dreamy looking women on the covers of books for women are "always bloody walking away from the camera, in a red dress! What's the red dress about? And there's always a handwriting font, for either the title or the author's name. Someone who likes literary fiction is probably not going to touch those books with a barge pole."

Aucklander Bianca Zander, whose two novels have sold in the United States, Britain and here, found that she had to fight for "decent" cover art. "The American market is so huge and competitive and moves so quickly that when you put a book out you have to target an audience and zero in on it with sniper-like precision," says Zander. "Books that sit in between genres, like mine, suffer, because the publisher will try to shoehorn it into a specific category, such as summer fiction for women, irrespective of what's between the covers. Then, when fans of that genre pick up the book they are disappointed — or worse, enraged — because the book wasn't what they were expecting."

Male stories win more awards

American writer Nicola Griffiths caused a stir earlier this year when she released her analysis of the major international book awards and found that not only were male authors far more likely to win them but that books about men were also more likely to win.

Intrigued by Griffiths' findings, Christchurch novelist Rachael King looked at the New Zealand Book Awards and found that while the major prize had gone to 10 women in the past 15 years, the protagonists of their books were overwhelmingly male. Only one winning book was wholly from the viewpoint of a female, and that was Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. Six of the winning books were written by women about men, four were written by men about men and and four were written by women about both men and women.

"I find that kind of scary, like we've got Stockholm Syndrome," says Auckland novelist Sarah Laing. "Women are writing but we feel like we have to adopt a male voice to be taken seriously."

She has written two novels, Dead People's Music from a female point of view, and The Fall of the Light from a male point of view, featuring an artistically frustrated architect. "My lead character [in The Fall of Light] was a difficult, unlikeable character and I wonder if I unconsciously chose a male because of our belief that women always have to be likable, they always have to be pleasing," says Laing. "If you want your character to be messy, gritty, violent – males have permission to be those things."

When she was writing her first novel, Zander was warned by mentor Curtis Sittenfeld, the American author of Prep and American Wife, to expect resistance and negative reaction to her stroppy main character, Suki, a young woman trying to find herself. Her publishers asked her to rework Suki but even when softened, Suki pushed people's buttons. Critics liked her, but some readers, says Zander, were "personally affronted by the character's narcissism — [but] she was meant to be narcissistic."

Blame Bridget Jones

"There's a kind of apologetic ditzy character that you have to write," she notes. You can blame Bridget Jones for that one, British writer Helen Feilding's wildly successful creation, a lovable screw-up who snared the big job and impressive partner almost in spite of herself. In the wake of Bridget Jones's Diary, a thousand less amusing and less authentic facsimiles were launched, and dominated female fiction for more than a decade. 

There's also a structural problem at play, says poet Siobhan Harvey, who like Zander teaches creative writing at Auckland University of Technology. Women writers – in common with females in all fields – tend to multitask in a way that men don't, taking on the lion's share of the domestic work for their families on top of their professional work. This can be a barrier to career-building opportunities such as creative residencies requiring successful applicants to move city or country for up to a year. 

Harvey warns her female students about the balancing act they will have to execute to make a living as writers. In addition to the writing and teaching that she loves, she takes on book review work and edits books, and says both are important for survival and professional credibility.

"The very fact that you open their eyes to the obstacles they will encounter because they are women at least gives them information, and information is power," she says.

 Stop writing, get back to the kitchen

Harvey has experienced outright discrimination from male writers, although she is quick to point out that the vast majority are supportive of their female peers. "I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that as a writer in New Zealand I have come across occasionally deeply misogynistic views being held about me as a writer. I was once told that myself and my fellow younger women writers should stop writing and go back to the kitchen and have children. This was by a mature man, another writer, and it wasn't that long ago."

Gender conventions rear their slimy little heads even when we are talking about local literary superstar Eleanor Catton, whose achievements should speak for themselves. When she won the Man Booker in 2013 she had to contend with descriptions of her youthful good looks and questions about her relationship with another writer, as if she were a pop star or television actress on the promotion trail. When was the last time you read about Julian Barnes' big blue eyes or Richard Flanagan's boyish grin?

While most female writers swallow their annoyance and get on with the job, they do speak among themselves about their disquiet. Zander says the gender imbalance is a frequent topic among her writer friends.

Jennifer vs Jonathan

One writer of female fiction who does complain, loudly, about the imbalance is Jennifer Weiner, bestselling author of Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, who has waged a long and very public war of words with Jonathan Franzen, the famously testy Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Corrections. Weiner has never argued that as a writer of genre fiction she is in the same league, artistically, as Franzen. But she does wonder why her work, and that of other hugely popular female authors – both genre writers and literary ones – doesn't seem to attract the same level of attention in the media. 

Apparently, she shouldn't tweet about this, or lobby on behalf of other female authors because her talent has been called into question by Franzen, who earlier this year told a literary journal, "To me it seems she's freeloading on the legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon to promote herself, basically." He also told the Guardian, at length, about why he doesn't value Weiner's opinion. 

It was a bit like a greyhound chasing a cage-raised bunny. She will never win. But she did coin a neat word for her feelings towards the attention heaped upon Franzen's latest besteseller: "Franzenfreude".