Women read more and engage more in writingbut of the total number of works registered in Spain in 2021, only 37.8% were by one author, which industry experts consulted by Efe explain in the lack of equal conditions for creation and the responsibility of publishers to have a peer catalog.
According to the latest edition of the study “Reading habits and buying books in Spain”edited by the Ministry of Culture, the percentage of women who read books in their spare time is significantly higher in Spain than that of men: 69.6% of women compared to 59% of men.
However, despite the fact that they read more, they are the main producers of literature: the data of works registered in the ISBN in 2021 they say that, of 66,371 titles registered in Spain, 61.8% are from men and 37.8% are from women (the rest are collective publications or registered as works of institutions or entities).
“For a long time we have focused on saying that women have been made invisible and that, therefore, their creative, literary or other work has not been taken into account. And this is true. But there is another aspect that is very interesting and must be taken into account, and it is that, over time, women have not been able to create value”, says the collaborating professor of the UOC’s Department of Arts and Humanities Montserrat Gatell.
“This a few years ago was very difficult to say, but the role of women in the world for centuries has been different and they have not had the same opportunities to access the world of knowledge. From the most classical antiquity, women did not have access to literacy,” she says.
And thus he answers one of the arguments that have often been put forward since the so-called “patriarchy“: “If there has been no Cervantes or Shakespeare woman, as they say, it is because they have not been given the opportunity”.
In his famous essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf It demanded for women writers a monthly income to be able to support themselves and their own space to be able to create.
That room “is nothing but a metaphor to claim the need to have adequate physical and mental conditions for creation”, says Gatell, who reflects that “the system tells women that their task is none other than to care”.
The editor and founder of Raig Verd Editorial, Laura Huerga, also explained to Efe that inequality in publishing “It worries a lot and for a long time” to the women of the sector.
“We are half the population but that is not reflected in acknowledgments nor in the number of publications”, points out the editor, who points out that each firm must also assume its share of responsibility and what to do to offer a parity catalogue.
Huerga points out that literature written by a woman and female stories and points of view have been considered as “minor themes and books”.
“The issue of women is talked about, as if they were less important, as if we were not all people and in the end we will face the same challenges and difficulties. There are many prejudices“, Add.
The editor also highlights the “lies” that have been cleared in recent years about the greater possibility of publication being a woman because readers, precisely, want to read more stories from their perspective.
“We saw it in the case of the pseudonym Carmen Mola, under which there was Tree men using the argument based on a lie that more women are published”, he denounces.
“In literature as in the media or in the gatheringsthere is the mirage that if there is a woman among many men, that is already parity,” he laments.
The mirage of equality is also reflected very clearly, remember, in the literary prizes: only 16 women have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which since its creation, in 1901, have won 112 men.
In Spain, the Cervantes Prize has awarded only 4 women against 41 men since 1976, and the Planeta Prize has been awarded to 17 women since 1952.