Why don't publishers believe women can write history?

American popular history is a “male preserve”, according to new research from the US online journal Slate, with three-quarters of works published last year written by men – and history experts believe the playing field is just as “heavily gendered” in the UK.

Slate looked at 614 popular history titles published in the US last year by 80 different presses, finding that 75.8% were written by men. Biographies, accounting for 21% of the books in the sample, were mostly written about, and by, men: 71.7% of the biographies had male subjects, with male authors writing 87% of them. Biographies of female subjects, meanwhile, were almost entirely written by women, with just 6% of male biography writers in the sample taking a female topic.

In the UK, the skew is just as dramatic. Figures from Nielsen BookScan show that last year, there were just four solo female authors appearing in the top 50 bestselling history titles: Mary Beard, in fourth place with SPQR, Caroline Moorehead, in eighth with Village of Secrets, Julie Summers, in 22nd withJambusters, and Selina Todd, in 42nd with The People. Two of the top 50 had a female co-author: The Girls Who Went to War, by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, and Hitler’s Last Day, by Emma Craigie and Jonathan Mayo.