I couldn’t help myself. I had to go through the fiction list as well. Then the non-fiction. And what an interesting result. The 2014 list of New Zealand books (the latest available from the Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s annual round-up) shows that 44 (or 59%) of the 75 New Zealand fiction titles published in 2014 were written by women, significantly more than those written by men (who wrote 31 fiction titles, or 41%). If you take out children’s and young adult fiction, the gap narrows somewhat, with 56% of adult titles written by women and 44% by men.
I wondered if chaps were more likely to tackle non-fiction and this does indeed seem to be the case, with all 11 non-fiction books in 2014 having been written by men . It’s a little different when you add in Letters & Autobiography and Drama (see charts below). And if you look at the whole lot together, ie all titles excluding poetry, it was very even, with 50% by men, 49% by women and 1% by both (ie multiple authors).
Ethnicity is a very different story. I only looked at fiction for this. A massive 88% of fiction titles were by Pakeha authors, 7% by Maori authors (better than I was expecting but still less than the proportion of Maori in the population) and 5% by Asian/Indian writers. No Pacific writers had fiction published in 2014. Not one.
The usual disclaimers apply – for source and methodology, please see my blog on poetry titles .
Janis Freegard's Weblog 
Thanks for this, Janis. Here is something similar:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/06/books-blokes-battles-history-written-by-men
re Pacific publication: Do you think coming from a strong oral tradition might affect interest in publishing? Or is that a red herring, given the number of avenues for publication there are now?
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/06/books-blokes-battles-history-written-by-men has some interesting comments, too. Thanks for posting this, Janis.
Not sure why it is. Maori also have a strong oral tradition and still get published (though proportionately less than Pakeha) and there are Pacific poets being published, juat not novelists it seems (except Albert Wendt). Thanks for the Guardian link.
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