Mind the Authority Gap

History books by men are bought in far greater quantities than those by women. Why?

Suzannah Lipscomb | Published in History Today Volume 72 Issue 4 April 2022

Choose wisely: Woman in a Bookshop, cover design for the quarterly magazine, ‘The Yellow Book’, by Aubrey Beardsley, c.1895. The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Wolfson History Prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for history. For half a century it has brought to the public’s attention excellent and readable works of scholarship. But it alone cannot change one of the greatest discrepancies in the public consumption of history: history books by men are bought much more than history books by women.

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