I’ve used this space before to meditate on the long-term declines in literary reading, as observed by various federal surveys. Occasionally, such data points can provoke a response. Last month, for example, the publisher Hatchette Book Group announced a “Raising Readers” initiative “to help reverse trends showing steep declines in reading for fun among children.”
This call to action reminded me of the genesis of the NEA Big Read, which, since 2006, has supported nearly 2,000 programs nationwide to celebrate reading and conversations about books and organize literary arts programming at the local level. Like Raising Readers, the NEA Big Read was established in response to federal statistics about literary reading rates.
And now? In a letter to authors, illustrators, and translators, Hatchette CEO David Shelley cites new evidence from surveys in the UK and the U.S.—including the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). As I previously reported, although the SPPA is an adult survey, its trend data correspond with a reduction in the shares of 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds who now read for fun, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (another source cited by Hatchette).
Over the last year, moreover, a flurry of news articles, op-eds, and blog posts have concentrated on reported slumps in fiction-reading by men. The most recent piece, by Constance Grady for Vox, does a nice job corralling these articles—but it questions whether fiction-reading rates have sharply diverged for men and women.
Because the article does not reference the most recent NEA data on reading, it’s worth considering the gender breakdown for fiction-reading as reported by the 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. (Regarding gender, the Census Bureau’s 2022 Current Population Survey, which hosts the SPPA questionnaire, offered respondents the choice of selecting “male” or “female.”) According to data from that survey wave, fewer than half (48.5 percent) of all U.S. adults read a book of any type in the previous year. This figure compares with 52.7 percent of adults in 2017 and 54.6 percent in 2012.
Over the same decade of measurement, fiction-reading rates saw a similar trajectory. At 45.2 percent, the 2012 share of adults who read novels or short stories was much lower than the share who had read any books in general. By 2017, 41.8 percent of adults had read novels or short stories in the previous year, and by 2022, the share was 37.6 percent.
But were the declines experienced proportionately by men and women alike? Let’s start by acknowledging the nearly 20-point spread in the percentages of men and women who read fiction in 2012. That year, 54.6 percent of women were estimated to have done so, compared with 35.1 percent of men.
Over the next two periods of data collection, fiction-reading declined at a comparable rate for both genders. In 2017, the share of women reading novels or short stories was down to 50.0 percent, and, in 2022, to 46.9 percent. Men readers saw their fiction-reading rate slip from 35.1 percent in 2012 to 33.0 percent in 2017 and then to 27.7 percent in 2022. The net result is that the difference in fiction-reading rates for men and women remains at just over 19 percentage points, as observed ten years earlier.
The gender gap, therefore, has persisted—with only the declines in women reading having prevented its expansion. Roughly one in four men read a novel or short story in 2022, compared with fewer than half of all women.
Even if many factors—such as competing options for one’s leisure time, including participation in social media, and/or addiction to one’s phone—have conspired to erode the percentage of all adults who read novels or stories, what accounts for the seemingly chronic depression of fiction-reading rates among men?
Here it may be helpful to return to National Center for Education Statistics data about how well boys read, in addition to how often they read, and ask whether and how formal instruction from elementary school through middle and high school, and (if applicable) all the way through higher education, are affecting their leisure reading behavior as adults. Outside school and family influences, it will be print and online publishers, libraries, literary arts organizations and programs—and, above all, writers—who have the best chance of boosting men’s reading rates.
We’ve just updated the guidelines for NEA Research Awards, for both Research Grants in the Arts and the NEA Research Labs program. The submission deadline for Grants.gov is March 24, 2025, at 11:59 pm EST. The submission deadline for the NEA Applicant Portal is April 3, 2025, at 11:59 pm EST.
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