Why don't women write 'Big Ideas Books?'

An important issue has been preoccupying the transatlantic blogosphere in this post-Obama world, and it concerns the question: What do Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and AC Grayling have in common? It is not a joke about the search results for the world's worst dating profile on mysinglefriend.com, and nor is it an advert for hair tonic. The answer is that all these people have published big, philosophical, opinionated treatises recently about the state of the world and their ever-so important views on it. The supplementary answer causing all the debate is that all these people are men.

Germaine Greer summed up the situation when she wrote about the launch of Gladwell's new book, Outliers: The Story of Success (Allen Lane). The book is billed as "the international bestselling guru's" answer to "the ultimate question: why are people successful?", and follows equally bombastically-promoted books from the New Yorker contributor and Great Thinker such as, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

Greer summarised books such as Gladwell's as "books about 'big ideas', and described their authors, collectively: "His maleness resounds from every monomaniacal sentence. There is no answer to everything, and only a deluded male would spend his life trying to find it." Women, she said, are too sensible to try to write such broad-sweep theses. "They are more interested in understanding than explaining, in describing rather than accounting for."

To find an example of a "book about 'big ideas'" by a woman, Greer looked back to 1962, and Rachel Carson's seminal book (if that is not the wrong term in the circumstances), Silent Spring, which first raised the novel subject of "ecology" in the public's consciousness. Not that Carson or her publisher would have billed it as a Big Ideas Book at the time, she added. But can it really be true that women have not written about big issues since the 1960s? Or that British women never thought of it at all? Other commentators seem to think so.

On the HarperStudio commentary at www.26thstory.com/blog, Julia Cheiffetz seemed to agree with Greer's hypothesis. "It is hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas (I'm thinking of Susan Orlean, Mary Roach, Karen Abbott [Americans])," she wrote, "or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses... simply isn't in our genetic makeup." Isn't in our genetic makeup? Probably not a conclusion that Greer would have supported.

It is possible that many of the fine British thinkers and writers who were products of the feminist discursive tradition of the 1970s – Michèle Roberts; Alison Light; AL Kennedy; Ruth Padel... – have since become typecast as "storytellers" or writers of literary fiction, however Big the ideas in their novels or poetry. Others headed towards academia. Zadie Smith, whose literary criticism is largely published by US magazines, only really makes headlines here with her novels. But it seems that America is still producing women writers in the tradition of Carson and her ilk.

Galley Cat, at www.mediabistro. com/galleycat, commented on Cheiffetz's words. "We're not entirely convinced. Right off the top of our head we thought of Susan Faludi and Naomi Klein [American and Canadian] in the 'explain it all' category." "Irresponsibility" at http://irresponsibility.wordpress.com responded less calmly. "Sisters. Seriously. WE ARE PART OF THE UNIVERSE. Ergo, our concerns are universal concerns." She advised women writers to stop discussing things in "twisted men's terms" and get on with defining the universe themselves. So where are they?

Over at Gladwell's publisher, Allen Lane, they can name several. In what is described as a "provocative and compelling book", Dambisa Moyo (a Zambian writer with a doctorate from Oxford and a masters from Harvard, who works in London) will argue that "the most important challenge we face today is to destroy the myth that aid actually works." Dead Aid will be published in January. Other Big Books for 2009 include The Spirit Level: Why Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, co-authored by the York academic Kate Pickett, and Judy Dunn's sociological study, A Good Childhood. A (woman) editor also points out that Allen Lane has already published writers including Susan Greenfield, Naomi Klein, Samantha Power, Judith Herrin...

If readers want to know about important and compelling subjects as seen by modern intellectuals who happen to be women, then, they only have to ask. The women on the right of this page are a tiny sample which is not intended to be representative. This is a point that is neatly made by Professor Lisa Jardine, who is herself a prolific author of Big Books, the chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London, a professor of Renaissance Studies and a modern-day Renaissance woman. "The world is awash with fantastic young women [writing about important subjects]," she says, "but the men are too busy looking at themselves in the mirror to notice." Her own books include Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution and lives of Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and Francis Bacon.

Other literary commentators, however, are not so sure. One publisher said: "There just don't seem to be as many of these books by women. I don't know why. Radio 4's Start the Week is always phoning us up wanting women guests to go on the programme but they always struggle to find them."

At the Felicity Bryan literary agency, this issue has been spotted. One of their agents, Catherine Clarke, is preparing for an international conference about the promotion of non-fiction, and will talk about the stir caused by Greer's and others' comments. "I was going to talk about history books, but given the debate about 'Big Ideas' novels the subject is suddenly very active," she says.

"Just looking at the evidence, subjects such as economics and military history, and books which show a grand sweep history, are very much dominated by men. Most are academics, and the fact that very few women are in senior positions in academia has to be related." She adds: "Academia can be a very political, bureaucratic business. I think that a lot of women, in particular, are unwilling to sacrifice their lives and careers in that sort of combative arena."

Critics have asked where are the women writing about the financial crisis. As if in response, last month Margaret Atwood published Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, an intellectual history of that takes in literature, linguistics and anthropology. But without wishing to seem ungrateful, where are the British women with big ideas? So many UK academics, such as Linda Colley, seem to have fled to Princeton and Yale to write about their ideas. She says: "To have the confidence to embark on a big ideas book, you usually need to be a senior academic; and the upper strata of British academe is still very male-dominated. It is also the case that many publishers, TV companies and literary agents still have very fixed ideas about what is a male and what is a female topic - wars, revolutions, big state histories are often supposed to be what the chaps do."

At the Felicity Bryan agency, one of their star performers is Karen Armstrong, whose books include A History of God, The Bible: The Biography and, next year, The Case for God. She is British but is "much better known in America and Europe than she is here," says Clarke. "I think Britain is just less interested in these subjects – it's more a European strand in philosophy. And she did rise to particular prominence after 9/11. Her books suddenly went into the bestseller lists in America then."

And what does Armstrong think? Is "intellectual audacity" not in her "genetic makeup"? Far from it. "There are probably all kinds of pressures on women [writers and academics] to get tenure and win respect from their male colleagues," she believes. "I have the great advantage in not being an academic but a freelance. And I also see myself as mak-ing big ideas... accessible to the general reader." In fact, she sees grand treatises like the ones Greer criticised becoming less and less popular. "I think the current trend in academe is actually against the 'Big Book'; the fashion in academia is, as I see it, to polish a small area of expertise and become an expert in that." Perhaps going out of fashion is another area in which Gladwell, Dawkins, Hitchens and Grayling will end up having something in common.

Outliers: a few more of Britain's leading (non-male) thinkers

AS Byatt, novelist and critic

The "big ideas" tendency in British media and academia has a big problem with the imagination. It never rates the sort of profound enquiry that might happen in novels or poems as pukka, serious thought. Hence the recurrent failure of intellectual boys' clubs such as 'Prospect' or the 'LRB' to do justice to literature. From a less narrow angle, AS Byatt could be fairly seen not merely as a cultural critic of scope and depth, exhibited in essay collections such as 'Passions of the Mind'. Her fiction itself – in works such as 'Angels & Insects' and 'Babel Tower' – explores the private and public use of belief systems in science, history or psychology.

Ruth Padel, classicist, poet, critic

Like Byatt, Ruth Padel sometimes suffers from the refusal of the heavyweight ideas brigade to engage on a non-trivial level with literature. A versatile and award-winning poet, in volumes such as 'The Soho Leopard' and 'Voodoo Shop', in other books she ranges from studies of Greek tragedy (her original academic speciality) to an account of the mythic dimensions of rock and pop culture in 'I'm a Man', and the ecological reflections of her travelogue 'Tigers in Red Weather'. Next year the poet and the thinker will come together as, in 'Darwin: a life in poems', Padel publishes a verse biography of her great-great-grandfather.

Lisa Appignanesi, historian and novelist

An advocate for free thinking on all fronts as president of English PEN, as an author Lisa Appignanesi spans an intellectual terrain that leaves many of the flashier theory-mongers looking like one-trick show ponies. A long-standing involvement in the history of mind-doctoring, and especially women's experience of it, gave rise first to 'Freud's Women' (with John Forrester) and then this year to the acclaimed 'Mad, Bad and Sad'. Other non-fiction books stretch from the post-Holocaust family memoir of 'Losing the Dead' to a study of cabaret and avant-garde art, while novels such as 'The Memory Man' also enshrine lively and learned debates about history and psychology.

Susan Greenfield, scientist and writer

Baroness Greenfield was the first women to give the hallowed Royal Institution lectures; she became its director, and an Oxford professor. As a neuroscientist, her research into conditions such as Alzheimer's opened the door into broad-brush popularisations in books such as 'The Private Life of the Brain', as well as 'Brain Story' on TV. This year, 'ID' offered a panorama of new approaches in science to human identity and intellect.

Deborah Cameron, linguist and writer

The "Rupert Murdoch professor" of language at Oxford, Deborah Cameron exemplifies the long march through the academy her generation of feminist thinkers undertook – and their later efforts to move the other way. 'Verbal Hygiene' in 1995 anticipated more recent 'PC' debates. Then, in 2007, 'The Myth of Mars and Venus' staged a bold popular assault on the modern fallacy of separate male and female languages. BOYD TONKIN