# Gender X literature

#### **Genderbias in literature** ####
(first few from our own Gender-bias article 2022)

- **Samia Touileb, Lilja Øvrelid, and Erik Velldal. Gender and sentiment, critics and authors: a dataset of Norwegian book reviews.** In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, pages 125–138, Barcelona, Spain (Online), December 2020. Association for Computational Linguistics.
**Abstract**: *Gender bias in models and datasets is widely studied in NLP. The focus has usually been on analysing how females and males express themselves, or how females and males are described. However, a less studied aspect is the combination of these two perspectives, how female and male describe the same or opposite gender. In this paper, we present a new gender annotated sentiment dataset of critics reviewing the works of female and male authors. We investigate if this newly annotated dataset contains differences in how the works of male and female authors are critiqued, in particular in terms of positive and negative sentiment. We also explore the differences in how this is done by male and female critics. We show that there are differences in how critics assess the works of authors of the same or opposite gender. For example, male critics rate crime novels written by females, and romantic and sentimental works written by males, more negatively.*

- **Claire Squires. The Review and the Reviewer,** pages 117–132. Routledge, 01 2020.
**Abstract**: *‘The Review and the Reviewer’ addresses the role of both the review and the reviewer within the wider framework of the circulation of books, assessing their roles and relationships to publishers, authors and (prospective) readers. The chapter does so both within the context of an historical overview, but also concentrates upon the review and the reviewers in the twenty-first century, including in the now thoroughly digital period. In so doing, it examines key themes and aspects of the historical development of reviewing, its role in the circulation and reception of books in a variety of market sectors, and in gatekeeping and constructing cultural value. It also considers the economics of reviewing, the review as form, and its role in the marketing and publicity of books. In addition, the chapter addresses the sometimes problematic positioning of reviewing with regards to a range of identities (both of the reviewer and the reviewed). The chapter concludes with an examination of the changes being brought to reviewing by digital technologies in their enabling of widespread, ‘amateur’ reviewing across a range of platforms, and their concomitant role in building communities around reading practices, and in creating data for algorithmically-led marketing processes. The chapter’s focus is predominantly upon the reviewing environment in the UK, though it brings in examples from across the Anglophone world.*

- **Alexandra Dane. Gender and Prestige in Literature.** Springer, 2020.

- **Lillian MacNell, Adam Driscoll, and Andrea N Hunt. What’s in a name: Exposing gender bias in student ratings of teaching.** Innovative Higher Education, 40(4):291–303, 2015.
**Abstract**: *Student ratings of teaching play a significant role in career outcomes for higher education instructors. Although instructor gender has been shown to play an important role in influencing student ratings, the extent and nature of that role remains contested. While difficult to separate gender from teaching practices in person, it is possible to disguise an instructor’s gender identity online. In our experiment, assistant instructors in an online class each operated under two different gender identities. Students rated the male identity significantly higher than the female identity, regardless of the instructor’s actual gender, demonstrating gender bias. Given the vital role that student ratings play in academic career trajectories, this finding warrants considerable attention.*

- **Corina W. Koolen. Reading beyond the female.** Phd-thesis (Riddle of Literary Quality), 2018. https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=cb936704-8215-4f47-9013-0d43d37f1ce7
**Abstract**: *This thesis combines methods from sociology of literature and natural language processing to answer the questions: what is the relationship between author gender and the perceived literary quality of her work? And to what extent can textual qualities be ascribed to author gender? I first assess Dutch female authors’ chances of gaining literary prestige. Even though female authors publish many literary works, they still have a harder time climbing the literary ladder. Results of the 2013 National Reader Survey mirror this skewness. Respondents were asked to supply ratings of literary quality, on a list of 401 recent, bestselling Dutch-language novels in several genres (the Riddle of Literary Quality corpus). Even within genre works by female authors’ are judged to be of lesser quality, and ‘feminine’ novels are seen as the worst; formulaic detectives score better. Female author gender is not a conscious motivation, but analysis of respondents’ motivations shows that instead, the text is associated with ‘femaleness’ – through genre, topics or style. Such associations lead to perception of lower literary quality. I then analyze the text of the novels themselves to examine to which extent such femaleness of text exists. First, computational analysis of the Riddle corpus indicates that author gender is too easily assumed to be the cause of text differences. Moreover, additional visualizations show that gender group differences are often caused by outliers. In the final chapters, I focus on a ‘feminine’ topic, attention to characters’ physical appearance. I show that it is not exclusive to the genre of chick-lit, nor to female authors. In fact, male literary authors write most about physical appearance, in describing female love interests. This novel approach shows that female author gender is connected to the text differently than expected. By reading differently, literary quality can be judged separate from female author gender.*

- **Corina W. Koolen and Andreas van Cranenburgh. These are not the Stereotypes You are Looking For: Bias and Fairness in Authorial Gender Attribution.** Proceedings of the First Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing, pages 12–22, Valencia, Spain, April 4th, 2017, pp. 12-22. https://aclanthology.org/W17-1602/
**Abstract**: *Stylometric and text categorization results show that author gender can be discerned in texts with relatively high accuracy. How- ever, it is difficult to explain what gives rise to these results and there are many possible confounding factors, such as the domain, genre, and target audience of a text. More fundamentally, such classification efforts risk invoking stereotyping and essential- ism. We explore this issue in two datasets of Dutch literary novels, using commonly used descriptive (LIWC, topic modeling) and predictive (machine learning) methods. Our results show the importance of con- trolling for variables in the corpus and we argue for taking care not to overgeneralize from the results.*

#
# Gender X genre

- **Verboord, Marc. "Female Bestsellers: A Cross-National Study of Gender Inequality and the Popular–Highbrow Culture Divide in Fiction Book Production, 1960-2009".** European Journal of Communication, vol. 27, no. 4, Dec. 2012, pp. 395–409. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323112459433.
**Abstract**: *This article studies trends in gender inequality in the domain of fiction books between 1960 and 2009 in France, Germany and the United States by analysing bestseller lists and literary award winners. It is argued that gender inequality is larger in fields or genres where more status is at stake for individual agents, as this causes an influx of men who then ?edge? women out of the field. The study finds evidence for this mechanism, as the presence of female authors in bestseller lists (exponent of the popular culture system) is larger than that among literary award winners (highbrow culture system) in all three countries. Cross-national differences are consistent (US smallest inequality, France largest), emphasizing the importance of field characteristics in explaining social inequalities in cultural production.*

- **Thelwall, Mike. ‘Book Genre and Author Gender: Romance>Paranormal-Romance to Autobiography>Memoir’.** Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, vol. 68, no. 5, 2017, pp. 1212–23. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23768.
**Abstract**: *Although gender differences are known to exist in the publishing industry and in reader preferences, there is little public systematic data about them. This article uses evidence from the book-based social website Goodreads to provide a large scale analysis of 50 major English book genres based on author genders. The results show gender differences in authorship in almost all categories and gender differences the level of interest in, and ratings of, books in a minority of categories. Perhaps surprisingly in this context, there is not a clear gender-based relationship between the success of an author and their prevalence within a genre. The unexpected almost universal authorship gender differences should give new impetus to investigations of the importance of gender in fiction and the success of minority genders in some genres should encourage publishers and librarians to take their work seriously, except perhaps for most male-authored chick-lit.*

- **Thelwall, Mike. ‘Reader and Author Gender and Genre in Goodreads’.** Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, vol. 51, no. 2, June 2019, pp. 403–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000617709061.
**Abstract**: *There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is the comic book, for which male reviewers prefer female authors, despite their scarcity. A word frequency analysis suggested that authors wrote, and reviewers valued, gendered aspects of books within a genre. For example, relationships and romance were disproportionately mentioned by women in mystery and fantasy novels. These results show that, perhaps for the first time, it is possible to get large-scale evidence about the reception of books by typical readers, if they post reviews online.*

## On the literary novel vs. genre-literature
- **Gupta, Suman. ‘On Mapping Genre: Literary Fiction/Genre Fiction and Globalization Processes’.** Globalizing Literary Genres, edited by Jernej Habjan and Fabienne Imlinger, Routledge, 2015, pp. 213–38. www.taylorfrancis.com, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315708621-23.
**Abstract**: *On 29 March 2014, the Oxford Literary Festival hosted a debate on the motion “Genre fiction is no different from literary fiction,” featuring four prominent novelists-Gaynor Arnold, Elizabeth Edmondson, Anita Mason, and Juliet McKenna. Their interventions were published throughout April in The Guardian. Despite different emphases, they made remarkably similar points: that “good writing” shines forth from the text irrespective of generic placements; that especially literary critics and to some degree marketing gurus are responsible for pigeonholing novels into genres, not authors; and that “genre fiction” is a broad church while “literary fiction” is a nebulous phrase. It was apparent that despite conviction in normative discernment and “literariness,” the phrase literary fiction has become emptied of meaning. Each of the authors had a reasonable grasp of what “genre fiction” consists in, and was able to understand “literary fiction” as not being that-or as being a matter of taste and convention that at times overlaps with much that passes as “genre fiction” and at other times repudiates “genre fiction” wholesale. At no point was it clear what these authors understood as “literary fiction,” except by negation from “genre fiction” or by vague assertions contra “genre fiction.” For this situation, of course, the debating authors were not responsible; the terms of the debate had put them in a corner. They had to assume that the phrases genre fiction and literary fiction have a preconceived, mutually definitive, and adversarial relationship. Manufacturing debates and controversies based on this assumption has become a fairly familiar pastime in the culture columns and review sections of news media. Not long before the Oxford Literary Festival debate, in 2012, a somewhat more colorful debate along these lines unfolded, in The New Yorker, Time, and elsewhere, between defender-of-literature-and-the-canon Arthur Krystal (2012a; 2012b) and champions-of-genre-fiction Lev Grossman (2012) and others. Unlike the authors mentioned above, Krystal believed he did have a clear sense of what is worth calling literature and what isn’t (and was to expound on it since: see Krystal 2014); however, at the time both sides felt they were talking at cross purposes, or rather, each side felt the other was missing the point. That too had something to do with the unquestioned assumption that genre fiction and literary fiction are mutually defined at odds with each other.*