According to Mandel’s analysis, the fate of the girl in a book by a male author was to be alive 68% of the time, 17% dead, and 15% missing or lost, while if the book was by a female author, she was alive 90% of the time. But “something interesting and faintly troubling happens when you separate the titles by author gender and run the same analysis”: the girl was less likely to be all right if the author was male. The girl, she found, was “usually all right”: according to her analysis, she was alive 85% of the time, 7% dead, 7% missing or lost (and less than 1% undead). But the “girl” of the title was also much more likely to be an adult than a child, with 65% of the “girls” actually women, 28% girls, and 7% “indeterminate”.

Mandel discovered that the “girl” books were much more likely to be written by a female author – 79% of the titles were by women. Working with research assistants, Mandel analysed the 2,000-plus most popular books with “girl” or “girls” in the title on Goodreads, filtering out those books with 250 or fewer ratings, and removing cookbooks and books for children and young adults.

“I was curious about more than just how often ‘girl’ books appeared I wanted to understand who was writing these books, and the fate of the ‘girl’ in the title.” “Who are these girls? Why are there so many of them? Books with ‘girl’ in their title make up a tiny fraction of all the books published in a given year, but they appear again and again on bestseller lists,” writes Mandel.

Emily st john mandel author