The gender ratio of the authors on the New York Times Best Seller list is one way to gauge how being a female writer today might be different from 70 years ago, in Shirley Jackson's time. The Best Seller list is the equivalent of the Billboard Hot 100 for literature, tracking the weekly 10-15 best-selling books since the 1940s. By taking the set of books that made it onto the list each year and looking at the gender of the authors, we can track the changing relationship between author gender and commercial success.

While books by women made up about one-third of the most read self-help books, the remaining two-thirds were written by men. Yet with only a few exceptions, books by women were mostly read by women – on average 83% of readers were women. Books with male authors get an even split of 50% male and female readers.