The majority of significant social concerns expressed in The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing revolves around the difficulty an individual faces in trying to fit into a larger society. The main characters of Bank's stories are variously confronted with gender and class divisions that make their movement in certain circles somewhat awkward. Though the divisions and frustrations Bank's characters experience might seem trivial, they reveal the presence, decades after the birth of feminism, of a tangible division between the careers available to women and those available to men.

Bank's short stories are principally focused on the difficulties faced by educated, middle-class women. She is concerned by the fact that, despite their education and their talents, these women are often excluded from the upper echelons of career success. In particular, she focuses on the inequities of the publishing industry in "My Old Man" and "The Worst...