“Do you read books?”
“Yes, yes…I do”
“Oh! What kind?”
“I don’t know, Psychology of Money? Atomic Habits?”
“Oh…”
One of the strangest things about the men around me is how little we seem to read our way into other people’s lives. You ask any man, or in my case a finance bro (no hate to them) about their favorite books, and it’s most often a self-help book about your investments, and how a 3% decrease in EBITDA is still a long term gain. All of them are good books mind you, nice reads as well. But a reader who spends most of his time reading about practices on how to make themselves look better rarely ever spends time in someone else’s shoes. Fiction does that for you. And isn’t that what empathy is about? To put yourselves in another’s place and feel like they do for a brief moment.
And you can retort by saying,“But Siddharth isn’t this a gross generalisation? Back up your claim for godsakes!”. To which I’d say, yes sir. In 2012, 35.1% of American men had read a novel or short story in the previous year, compared with 54.6% of women. Ten years later, both groups were reading less, but the gender gap was almost exactly where it had been: 27.7% for men, 46.9% for women. So in 2022, only about one in four American men had read a work of fiction. But this is American men we’re talking about. I want to see if my neighbour’s son is reading more about the Monk who sold his Ferrari or about the life of the March sisters, and wondering if if Meg marries John Brooke.
So I dug deeper and found a study that is not very robust but does the job for all intents and purposes. India doesn’t necessarily have a dataset like we did for the USA so I had to think outside the box a little.
One of the best ways that reading is inculcated into a person’s life is during their adolescence and early teenage years. And I found two studies that talk about reading consumption patterns according to genre conducted in Indian schools. A study of 150 Class 11 and 12 students in Srinagar found that girls have a greater preference for fiction while boys prefer non-fiction, and that the non-fiction students read most was self-help and personality development. A Tamil Nadu school study likewise found that more boys than girls prefer non-fiction. Together they suggest the pattern starts in school. Why is this the case? I have a theory. Two, actually, and neither needed a research grant and are the ideas of my own genius.
One, self-help sells itself to men as a tool. Every book comes with a promise. Read this, earn more, sleep better, wake up at five like a monk with a Bloomberg terminal. A novel promises nothing. No framework, no takeaways, no returns, and the finance bro in my head cannot justify spending a Sunday on something that won’t pay him back. Reading turns into another line on the self-optimisation spreadsheet, and fiction fails the audit.
Two, somewhere along the way fiction was handed a gender. Stories about feelings, families and inner lives got filed under “girl stuff”, and boys pick this up early, from what gets teased and what gets recommended. Here’s the funny part, though. A recent study found that men are perfectly fine reading about female protagonists. Meg March would not scare us off. Publishers just assumed she would, and then sold accordingly.
Now before you say it, yes, the research on fiction building empathy is still debated, and the effects are modest. I won’t call a novel a moral vaccine. But three hundred pages inside a stranger’s head is practice at the exact thing we seem short of. Self-help can’t give you that, because its subject is always you.
So the next time someone asks what you read and you feel the “Oh…” coming, have a better answer ready. Pick up one novel this month. Little Women is a fine start. And yes, Meg marries John Brooke. You’re welcome.
Sources-
Bologna, F., Lundberg, I., & Wilkens, M. (2025). Causal effect of character gender on readers’ preferences. Anthology of Computers and the Humanities. https://doi.org/10.63744/hEF2pUnudmPh
Iyengar, S. (2025, January 10). The men-women split in reading is real—and persists amid historical rate declines. National Endowment for the Arts. https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2025/men-women-split-reading-real-and-persists-amid-historical-rate-declines
Loan, F. A., & Shah, R. (2017). Survey of the literature reading habits and preferences of adolescents: A study of a public school in India. LIBRES, 27(2), 80–96. https://doi.org/10.32655/LIBRES.2017.2.3
Ramasamy, K., & Padma, P. (2020). Does the gender influence the reading habits, preferences and attitudes of school students? A case study. Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal), Article 3549. https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/libphilprac/3549