The demise of men reading books has, once again, been greatly exaggerated.

A recent ABC article about Australians’ reading habits claimed “Australians, especially men, are reading less than ever before” and “the data showed females, on average, were reading more than males across all age groups”.

This coverage was picked up by an opinion piece in the Age, with the headline “Young men have stopped reading books – and these are the reasons why”, which also said “the percentage of men who would pick up any book at all is very small”.

So have men actually stopped reading? Has there been a decline in reading overall? And how do reading rates compare between males and females?

The ABC and the Age articles were largely based on figures from the ABS Time Use Survey – the proportion of people, by age group, who participated in reading in a two-day period in 2020-21:

The main thing is the little black lines – the “confidence interval” – a statistical measure of uncertainty that can be used when showing the average value of data from a survey (or other type of research).

And what this means, which I have confirmed with the ABS, is that the reading rates are statistically the same for males and females within all generations with the exception of gen X.

Equally fraught is claiming that reading has declined from this data as reading habits may differ by stage of life – perhaps people read more as they get older.

The higher reading rates for older cohorts are likely affected by the survey methods, too – counting reading of a physical newspaper, but not reading of news online (“general internet and device use”).

All of that said, we do know from other research that there has been a decline in reading rates, and that females do read more than males generally – though the difference is usually only somewhere about 7% to 11%.

However, different surveys measure different things, in different ways, which makes it tricky to compare them.

For example, the National Arts Participation Survey (Naps) measures any reading at all in the past 12 months and only counts reading as including “novels, poetry, creative nonfiction and short stories”.

In this data, younger people surveyed had a higher reading participation rate than several of the older demographics – the opposite of what we see in the ABS Time Use Survey.

So what can we say about declining reading rates?

Figures on this were surprisingly hard to find, however, thanks to the researchers at the University of Melbourne, I can share figures from the Hilda survey (which to the best of my knowledge haven’t been published until now!).

In 2012, 2016 and 2020 people were asked how frequently they read either books or magazines and newspapers in the past 12 months. The gist is that they’re reading books less frequently, and increasingly not at all:

Splitting the data by gender shows the decline has been consistent for males and females surveyed, and the gap in reading rates for males and females is consistent with other surveys:

Males are, however, more likely than females to be frequent readers of news and magazines:

The difference in reading rates by formats is something we see in other data, too. In the Naps data females read more in every category except for graphic novels and comics:

And other reports cite higher audiobook usage in certain demographics.

Finally, on age groups, we can see that reading has declined across the board, but it has declined the least in the oldest age group:

So what are we to make of all this sometimes seemingly contradictory data?

It looks like reading statistics vary greatly depending on how the question is asked. Multiple surveys show that a significant proportion of males are still reading books, though they’re doing so less frequently than they used to. And it’s clear that if there is a crisis of declining reading rates, it is affecting men and women, boys and girls.

Anna Burkey, the head of the reading research and advocacy group Australia Reads, agrees that focusing on men is something of a red herring.

“The problem to me is the downward trend across the population,” she says.

“And I think that when we get into conversations about [gender] we get into really unhelpful discussions about boy books and girl books – which don’t exist.

“It’s about finding material that is delivered in a format that is suitable for that person, and are we doing that well. And if we get too hung up on the gender divide we get really gendered in our responses, and that’s not going to necessarily solve the core problems [with declining reading rates].”

So, what can we do to increase reading rates? Burkey says there are two aspects to this – the personal response and the response from government.

At the government level, Burkey says the lack of consistent, detailed and reliable data about reading behaviour is a real problem, and could be addressed by a government-led national reading strategy.

“We want a national reading strategy where we’ve got funds to do proper annual tracking around behaviour, and to see if what we’re doing, all these things we’re all trying to boost reading rates, is working,” she says.

“We need the funded national strategy and the campaigns that come with that, in a way like we do health advertising. This is a public good.”

And at the personal level, Burkey wants everyone, from normal people to politicians and celebrities, to be talking more about reading and books.

“It’s about taking the literature out of the book space and just say, what do you love at the moment? And make it as visible as we can. Read, ask people about reading, and try to make it visible.”