Women are better writers than men.
That statement makes people’s jaws drop.
Seriously, how could women possibly be better writers than men when almost all of the greatest writers in history were men?
Leo Tolstoy. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky. Mark Twain. James Joyce. Hermann Hesse. Ernest Hemingway. William Faulkner. Dante Alighieri. Franz Kafka. George Orwell.
Should I even go on? All men.
But we have to understand that throughout history, the world of literature was consumed by gender bias. Today, things are different. If we take a look at the gender equality analysis of New York Times best sellers, we’ll see that both genders are almost equally represented today.
If you check Amazon’s list of best sellers, you’ll notice the same thing. Women are taking over literature and they are being presented in all genres.
And if we start talking about copywriting, things are even more different.
Let’s try to solve this issue once and for all: are women better writers than men?
1. Women Are More Emphatic
“They understand who their audiences are” – that’s one of the most important characteristics that the best copywriters have in common. To understand the audience, you need a character trait known as empathy. Scientists proved that for a fact: women in general have a greater empathic response than men.
Empathy is the ability to understand one’s feelings and share them. When a woman writes for a specific type of audience, she understands exactly how they feel.
It’s no wonder why Arundhati Roy can make you cry, laugh, hope, and despair within the same chapter of The God of Small Things. She knows how to awaken feelings in her audience because she understands how her character feels and she can convey those emotions.
It’s no wonder why a woman travel blogger will make you feel like you’ve experienced everything she did. When a woman writes well, her empathy contributes towards a warmer, more sensible text. Hopefully, we’re over those times when sensibility was a bad thing in literature. It’s time to embrace it.
2. Women Invest More Effort in Their Characters
Someone is probably thinking about writing this comment right now: “Yeah, right; a woman could never develop the characters like Hesse or Dostoevsky did.”
Yes. She could.
It’s not okay to compare today’s literature to classic literature, simply because it’s different and it’s being written for another kind of audience. If we compare today’s men writers to today’s women writers, we’ll realize that men are more likely to get to the point, whereas women will spend significant time developing the characters.
A poll conducted by Grammarly showed that. 55.60% of men writers like to get to the point, and 83.30% of women writers will first spend significant time building the characters.
What does this tell us?
Let’s take a modern book written by a woman as an example: Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. It’s about two girls dreaming about becoming dancers. We see them dream and grow together. The readers get to know these characters. They cheer for them. They get angry because of them. These girls are so real and so well-developed that the story becomes more realistic than anything Dostoevsky ever wrote.
Yes. I made the comparison. Sue me.
3. Women Are Better than Grammar
According to the data provided by RushMyEssay, 52% of the students who come to them for writing help are male. Their most common issue is lack of time, but they also struggle with the English grammar.
Is that just a conclusion made out of the practices of a single writing service? No. Scientists proved that fact: females on average are better in grammar than males.
They process words differently, and they are better at tasks that require declarative memory. In females, the brain areas responsible for language work harder during language tasks. When boys are performing those tasks, they rely on different parts of the brain, making language processing more sensory.
4. The Claim that Men Write Better Is Based on Gender Bias
Men are more likely to be successful in their writing careers.
That’s a sad statement, but it’s true.
Anne Enright, a Laureate for Irish Fiction, is committed to exploring the gender bias in the world of publishing. “Listening to arguments about gender makes men mildly defensive and takes very little of their time. If you are a woman, making these arguments will eat your head, your talent and your life. None of this ever seemed to me fair, or even useful,” – she says. “I am, by age and stage, a kind of bridge between a bright future for the voices of Irish women and a terrible past.”
Throughout her activism, Anne Enright emphasized the point that men rarely review books written by women, as if it was beneath their level. Books by men, on the other hands, are gaining critical acclaim by both genders.
Literary editors still live in the past. Without any justification, women have a hard time getting noticed. So if you still think that men are better writers, remind yourself that your thoughts have been influenced by prejudices that have been going on for centuries.
5. Women Tend to Look at the Bigger Picture
Let’s take a look at another scientific study. This one found a serious gender gap in people’s life goals. It showed that women had a higher number of life goals when compared to men. They are less likely to take advantage of opportunities for professional growth, and they place less importance on power-related goals.
What does this tell us?
If we connect this study to writers, we’ll make a logical assumption: men see writing as a career, whereas women see it as part of their life. That’s why a woman’s writing may often seem less ambitious, less arrogant, and less elitist. It’s more real. And for today’s readers, real is better.
A woman is just as capable as a man to write epic posts and epic books. But she is less likely to take the opportunist’s attitude towards this job. She is more likely to preserve her intuitive passion towards the whole process.
So Who Is a Better Writer?
Let’s be real: there isn’t and there can’t be a direct answer to that question.
This is not a competition.
When you write, you’re not trying to be better than a woman or a man. You’re just trying to be better than you ever were.
As for the gender bias in literature, it’s time for all of us to stand against it. Start from yourself. Do you have any prejudices against women writers? Do you think men are necessarily better? Take a book written by a woman. Pick one from a gender you like. Pick one whose description you like. Read it. Don’t pay attention to the gender of the author. Just read the book. You’ll be convinced!
What’s Your opinion? Let me know in the comments below?
