Men, Women, and Books: How Gender Shapes What We Read

The data is consistent, the patterns are real, and they're more nuanced than the stereotypes suggest. Here's what we know about how gender influences reading habits, and what it might tell you about your own shelf.

Walk into any bookshop on a Saturday morning and look at who's there. Browse a book club's membership list, or scroll through the reviews on Goodreads. The pattern is hard to miss: women read more, buy more books, and engage more visibly with reading culture than men do.

But that simple observation hides a much richer picture. Gender shapes not just how much people read, but what they read, why they read, how they discover books, and what they're looking for when they open one. It's a fascinating window into what reading actually means to different people.

It might also explain a few things about your own habits, or about why the reader in your life is so hard to buy for. Let's dig in.

The Headline Numbers: Women Read More

The gender gap in reading is one of the most consistent findings in decades of research, and it always runs the same direction. Pew Research Center data from 2023 found that 82% of American women had read at least one book in the past year, compared with 68% of men. On average, women get through about fourteen books a year while men manage around nine.

The gap is widest in fiction. National Endowment for the Arts data shows roughly 47% of women read novels or short stories in a given year, against about 28% of men, a difference of nearly 19 points that has barely moved in over a decade. In 2023, women made up 80% of the book-buying market in the UK, US and Canada, and accounted for 65% of all fiction purchases in the UK.

None of this means men don't read. It means men read differently, and the differences are genuinely interesting.

Genre Preferences: Where the Differences Show Up Most

The biggest gender difference in reading isn't how much people read but what they choose. Genre preferences divide fairly consistently, though with more overlap, and more surprising exceptions, than you might expect.

Women are the dominant audience for fiction overall, especially the genres driving the biggest growth in the market right now: romance, romantasy and the domestic thriller. Men lean toward nonfiction (63% of male readers in one survey said they prefer it), particularly history, biography, politics, business and science.

Within fiction, men gravitate toward action, plot-driven stories, and worldbuilding-heavy genres like science fiction and fantasy. Women are more likely to seek out books built around relationships, emotional complexity and interior life. That's a tendency, not a rule, and the overlap is huge.

Thrillers and crime fiction are the great meeting point. Both men and women read them in large numbers, which is part of why crime is such a reliably strong seller. If you're ever stuck choosing a book for someone whose taste you don't know, a good thriller is rarely a bad bet.

How Men and Women Read: The Habits Behind the Choices

These habits say something meaningful about the different relationships people have with books. Women are more likely to treat reading as a social activity: sharing recommendations, discussing books with friends, joining clubs, writing reviews. Men are more likely to read independently and to pick books based on a trusted author or a specific subject they want to understand.

The novelist Amor Towles suggested in a widely shared 2024 interview that men tend to fall out of the habit of reading fiction after 30. Not because they stop enjoying it, but because the culture around them rarely reinforces it. Unlike sport, music or film, fiction reading in adult life is rarely framed as something men do.

Where the Stereotypes Break Down

For all the consistency in the data, there are some genuine surprises.

Romance, long assumed to be an exclusively female genre, has more male readers than most people realize. A 2025 ThriftBooks survey of 2,000 romance readers found that 63% of the men who read the genre consider themselves die-hard fans, slightly more than the 60% of women said the same. The men who read romance also spend more hours in it per year than the women do. The idea that romance belongs to women is increasingly out of step with who's actually reading it.

Historical fiction is another place where the gap is smaller than expected. Both men and women rank it among their favorite genres, though they drift toward different eras: women more often toward dual timelines and the 13th to 16th centuries, men toward the ancient and medieval worlds.

And men are far from absent in self-help and personal development. If anything they're the core audience. Business books, leadership titles, and books on productivity, psychology and personal finance are read predominantly by men, and they're among the strongest-selling nonfiction categories going.

What This Means for Your Next Book

None of this is destiny. Data describes crowds, not individuals, and the best reading lives tend to ignore the averages entirely. But the patterns are useful in a couple of practical ways.

First, they make you a better gift-giver. Knowing that many men choose books by author and subject while many women respond to story, cover and word of mouth can save you a lot of guesswork in December.

Second, they're an invitation to read against your own grain. If you're a die-hard nonfiction reader, a novel might give you something no history book can: the experience of another mind from the inside. If you live in fiction, a great biography or a sharp book on psychology can scratch an itch you didn't know you had. Some of the best reading experiences happen just outside your usual lane.

That's how we've built our shop. We stock across categories, the ones you already love and the ones you haven't tried yet, because the data only tells us where readers start. Where you go next is entirely up to you.

Read beyond the statistics. Browse our full range, from romance and crime to history, biography and business. → Shop the Dace Publishing Collection