In 2022, 49.2% of American women read a novel or short story. Among men, the figure was 29.5%. That's not a rounding error. It's a 20-point gap, and it's held steady for over a decade.
The numbers come from the National Endowment for the Arts' Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, run with the Census Bureau. It's the most rigorous long-run dataset on American reading habits there is. The fiction gap is one of its steadiest findings.
One limit worth naming: this survey, like most cited here, only asks for binary gender, man or woman. Nonbinary and genderqueer readers don't show up in the data at all.
Overall book reading tells a similar story. In 2022, 56.6% of women read a book of any kind, compared with 40% of men. Both rates have fallen since 2012, by roughly seven points on each side.
The decline is real, but it hasn't touched the gap. Men and women drifted downward together and stayed exactly as far apart.
Sunil Iyengar, the NEA's director of research and analysis, has said both populations deserve closer study. Why do men and women pick up fiction, or skip it, at such different rates?
That's the more interesting question. The topline gap is well known. The split by genre and by age gets far less attention.
Who reads what: the genre breakdown
Genre data confirms the split isn't just about volume. It's about taste, and the taste gap is wider in some categories than others.
Romance is the clearest example. A December 2025 YouGov survey asked readers what they'd read that year. 32% of women had read a romance novel. Among men, it was 12%.
Older genre surveys put the gap even wider. Depending on the year and the question, women have outread men on romance by ten-to-one or more.
Mystery, thriller, and crime shows a smaller but still clear split. 18% of women who name a favorite genre point to mystery and crime, against 10% of men. History runs the other way: 14% of men cite it as their most-read genre, against 7% of women.
A few categories barely move by gender. Religion and spirituality sit at 13% for both men and women. Fantasy has narrowed too. Genre fiction used to skew heavily male. Now, reader surveys put fantasy close to an even split, tighter than romance, mystery, or history.
The split starts in childhood
The genre gap isn't something that appears in adulthood. YouGov's generational reading data shows the split forming early, in the books adults picked up as kids.
Among adults recalling their childhood reading, 17% of women say young adult fiction was a favorite growing up. For men, it's 6%. Science fiction runs the opposite way: 17% of men name it as a childhood favorite, against just 4% of women. Each gender lands on a genre track early, well before either has much of a say in it.
Where age cuts across gender
Age adds a second axis, and it doesn't always line up with gender. Romance and fantasy tie as the most-read genres among adults under 30. Each claims 10% of younger genre readers, a higher share than any older age group gives either one. Readers 65 and older lean hardest into history, at 13%.
Younger readers are also less likely to finish what they start. About 40% of readers 45 and older say they always finish a book. Among readers under 30, it's just 22%. The surveys don't say whether that's shorter attention spans or simply more books competing for the same hours.
What to do with any of this
None of these numbers say what any one reader should pick up next. A 20-point gender gap is a population-level pattern, not a rule for any individual's shelf. Genre lines have always been softer than surveys make them look.
What the data is useful for is noticing your own pattern. Track what you read, genre by genre, and your habits might look nothing like the demographic average. Or exactly like it.
Seekquel logs that as you add books. No pushed titles, no ads, no sponsored picks, just a record of what you've actually read.