Skip to main content

You say causation, I say correlation... let's call the whole thing off

Thanks to the excellent Rosy Thornton for pointing out this piece in the Guardian blogs, suggesting that we should 'make sure the next book we read is by a woman.' I find this offensive and I suspect behind the rhetoric is my favourite bugbear, a confusion of correlation and causality.

I would suggest that the vast majority of people do not choose their books based on the gender of the author, even subconsciously. Instead, most of us read books in a genre or genres that we like (and there's nothing wrong with that, though I always encourage people to experiment and take a tiptoe out of their habitual genres).

Here comes the correlation bit. In quite a few genres, one sex of author dominates. I happen to read mostly popular science and science fiction, which have a preponderance of male authors. If instead I happened to enjoy reading fiction the genre that is usually labelled 'chick-lit' (though I think the term is going out of fashion), I suspect I would be reading books where most authors are female - but I don't. In fact a genre I read less frequently, but do read occasionally, is crime, and there female authors do dominate my reading. If you look on my shelves for crime books*, you will find titles by Margery Allingham, P. D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Susan Hill, Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George hugely dominating those by Colin Dexter and Jonathan Gash, who are the only male crime writers I own books by.

Now I don't think there is anything sinister in the predominance of male writers in science fiction or women writers in crime. It isn't some conspiracy by the publishers - it's quite simply that more men choose to write science fiction and more women choose to write crime. In both cases there are plenty of exceptions, but I'm just talking about the overall picture. So if I, as a man, have chosen to read more books by men (and I think that is true), it is due to an incidental correlation of the sex of the author with the genre they write in, rather than a causal connection between the authors' gender and my decision to read their books.

I think to suggest that we should consciously decide to read a book by a woman is a terrible approach - because we should never be choosing books on the gender of the author (surely the whole point of this business), yet that is exactly what we are being asked to do. I suspect if there was a better understanding of the difference between correlation and causality in the literary world this wouldn't be an issue.

* If anyone thinks this is unrepresentative as a sample of modern crime authors, I only really read the sub-genre of 'traditional English crime'.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp
117 comments
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor
25 comments
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense
6 comments
Read more