On the train, gone, or with a tattoo: what happens to all those 'Girls' in book titles? | Books | The Guardian

Mandel discovered that the "girl" books were much more likely to be written by a female author - 79% of the titles were by women. 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".

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 "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. 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.