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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

> I believe the former is the case.

I'm just curious why you hold that belief? I don't have an opinion either way, but I'm curious if that is an informed belief.

I agree that it was a problem even more recently than a century ago. It was probably a problem as recently as 10 years ago. However, in 2017, it's not hard to be published. You can even self-publish.

Unless the topic is related to the author's identity (i.e. it's about gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.), I don't see why someone should care about the identity of an author.

Take "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" on your list. Why does the gender of the author matter for such a topic? Books are written by individuals not demographics.

This is a genuine question and not an attempt to troll. I don't understand why gender or any other identity needs to be a concern aspects where it is orthogonal/unrelated.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14923781 and marked it off-topic.

http://jezebel.com/homme-de-plume-what-i-learned-sending-my-...

I have posted it twice to HN, and it was essentially ignored, but it provides good evidence that women writers have a much harder time getting published simply because they are female.

I don't disagree that this is a problem that should be solved, but it doesn't answer my question. Why should I, as a reader, just try to find quality interesting content care about the identity of the author. Authors are just individuals to me. Unless their experience by virtue of their identity is relevant to the subject matter at hand, why should use identity in deciding what to read instead of just relying on subject matter and positive reviews and recommendations?

Why should I, as a reader, just try to find quality interesting content care about the identity of the author.

Sorry, it seems really obvious to me and I have heard it said before, so didn't feel I needed to spell it out: Female authors must be better than most to have any shot at getting published. So, women authors who do get published tend to be better authors than most male authors.

You aren't required to care. Whether or not you care is on you, but if you want quality writing, there is evidence that due to the fact that women are discriminated against, IF they manage to get published, their writing will be of unusually high quality.

Because when you become aware that an injustice exists you should consciously try to do something about it? One of the easiest ways to do something about it is by buying and supporting work by female authors.

And of course a writer's identity will play a role in the work that they produce. No one is writing Toni Morrison besides Toni Morrison, and a Fanon essay is a Fanon essay because he experienced being black in France and Algeria.

I'm sorry, I don't buy books to solve injustice. I buy them to be informed or entertained.

Why stop at choosing books by gender? If it's irrelevant to the subject matter being written on, should I buy books based on someone's nationality? Their religion? Their race? Their sexual orientation?

Citing examples of authors where the subject matter is relevant to their identity is not a counter-argument to the point I'm making. I'm in agreement that only Toni Morrison can write about Toni Morrison's identity-related experiences and only Fanon can write about Fanon's identity-related experiences. However, if Fanon and Toni were to both write a book on something like the 2008 banking crisis, I would expect the their lived identity-related experiences to be largely irrelevant to the final product each produces.

This reduction of individuals to their identity is dehumanizing.

You don't think a person of color writing about the subprime mortgage crisis would write a different book than a white banker that worked at Bear Stearns? A crisis in which black and Latino applicants were almost 2.5 times more likely to be given a subprime rate in comparison to white applicants? [1]

No one is reducing individuals to their race or gender identity, but unless we're talking about pure science and mathematics books it is a show of ignorance to argue that lived experience has no bearing on the work of the author.

[1]http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2013.771788

The inherent racism in your example notwithstanding, the two examples you chose aren't even comparable. You didn't say "a person of color" and "a white person". You said "a person of color" and a "white banker that worked at Bear Sterns". That's pure apples and oranges.

The relevant lived experience is being a banker at Bear Stearns, not the race of that banker. Also, how do I know the person of color isn't also a banker at Bear Sterns. I worked in Wall Street years ago, and yes, I had co-workers that were people of color.

Would you please stop? This is long past tediously off topic.

Identity of the author matters because a writer's work is informed by their experience in the world. As a white male, I will view & experience the world differently from Jane Jacobs. Even in a book about facts, a person's relation to those facts reflects their lived experience.

This is especially important in fiction books where you are immersed in the experience of main characters. If the authors identity mirrors yours, then the experience of the main character will not build my understanding of how other people live. At this point, you are reading only for entertainment (which is fine, but you must acknowledge and accept that).

Books, whether fiction or nonfiction, are stories. They present information in a narrative. That narrative will be determined by who writes it and how they've lived their life.

I don't disagree with what you wrote, but it's like you didn't even bother to read and parse what I wrote before you responded:

> Unless the topic is related to the author's identity (i.e. it's about gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.), I don't see why someone should care about the identity of an author.

There are hundreds of thousands of non-fiction topics where the identity of the author is irrelevant (or at least one of the least relevant factors impacting the authors work). Why should I care in those cases?

> Why should I care in those cases?

I thought the GP answered your question succinctly as follows:

>> Even in a book about facts, a person's relation to those facts reflects their lived experience.

Why should I elevate one of their lived experiences (their gender in this case) over all of their other lived experiences? For many topics, experiences attributable to one's gender is all but irrelevant relative to experiences not attributable to gender.

Why not their age? nationality? place of birth? race? sexual orientation? height? native language? myers-briggs personality type? etc., etc.,

I didn't single out gender. All of those other factors are attributes of lived experience. However, restricting yourself to a confined set of those accumulated attributes is likely to yield a restricted view of the world.

Yes, good point! Those are all important as well. I did not intend in my comment to emphasize a binary identity for authors. Seek out books by authors from any lived experience dissimilar from yours to maximize your grasp of our world.

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