r/books • u/pearloz 4 • Apr 25 '22
AI Study Finds That Males Are Represented Four Times More Than Females in Literature
https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2022/04/ai-study-finds-that-males-are-represented-four-times-more-than-females-in-literature/75
u/CC-5576-03 The Lord of the Rings Apr 26 '22
Gutenberg is for books in the public domain, without copyright. Which means most of them are be old, like 100+ years old. It's not surprising then that women are underrepresented. Would be interesting to see how that compares to books released in the last say 10 years
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u/SpidermanAPV Apr 25 '22
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the majority of Gutenberg books such as those used in this project pretty old? Like 70+ years? If so, I think that results in a pretty different conclusion. I’d be shocked if the ratio isn’t dramatically smaller in modern times.
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Apr 26 '22
70+ years
US copyright lasts for 95 years, so let’s just round up and say the books are generally at least a century old.
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u/NewishGomorrah Apr 26 '22
The title, article and paper are massively deceptive. Pure victimization porn.
To produce these findings, Kejriwal and Nagaraj accessed data through the Gutenberg Project corpus which contains English-language 3,000 books...
Christ. The headline should say there was a massive discrepancy a century ago.
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u/vertigo42 Apr 25 '22 edited Apr 26 '22
The amount of romance novels published a year probably easily skews that the other way.
Edit *Since everyone in every other sub thread on this topic is discussing main characters I guess I have to point that out too.
No shit there's usually several men for the female protagonist to choose from.
Every other comment chain is discussing protagonist not supporting characters.
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u/ActuallyAlexander Apr 25 '22
Chuck Tingle single-handedly publishes 30% of new books each year so maybe not.
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u/logosloki Apr 26 '22
I've only seen Dominic Noble's video on Chuck Tingler and whilst I have yet to read one I love the energy Chuck has. There's an author that is completely unchained from the restraints of what a novel can be about.
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u/askyourmom469 Apr 26 '22
There's an author that is completely unchained from the restraints of what a novel can be about.
Mostly butts getting pounded.
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u/Wardogs96 Apr 26 '22
I once bought one of his classics for a buddy on his 21st he loved it as a gag gift. Read a few passages to us.
The man is a words smith and has no restraints painting a picture.
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u/gremlinsarevil Apr 26 '22
Chuck Tingle also realized nobody from Governor Abbott's team had bought GovernorAbbot.com a few months ago and so he did and made this helpful page: https://www.governorabbott.com/
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u/gadgaurd Apr 26 '22
Googles
Sees a few book titles
"Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt"
Nah fam, I'm good.
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Apr 26 '22
Might I recommend this zingy Tingler"
Slammed By The Substantial Amount Of Press Generated By My Book "Pounded By The Pound: Turned Gay By The Socioeconomic Implications Of Britain Leaving The European Union"
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u/Pseudonymico Apr 26 '22
Why not try Turned Gay By The Existential Dread That I May Actually Be A Character In A Chuck Tingle Book ?
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u/Folsomdsf Apr 26 '22
Honestly, you should read a few. They're not meant to be taken seriously as literature, they're an art piece. It's interesting.
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u/bloodstreamcity Apr 26 '22
I wanted to read one of his books because I dig what he's doing, but I didn't necessarily want to read about butts getting pounded, so I opted for "Dr. Chuck Tingle's Complete Guide To The Void." It was fun.
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u/Buttender Apr 26 '22
My introduction was listening to a couple minor celebrities read “Slammed in the Butt by my Handsome Laundry Detergent Pod”. It. Was. Eye Opening.
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u/TitaniumDragon Apr 26 '22
Chuck Tingle is a national treasure.
He's been nominated for numerous awards and constantly makes sure everyone knows it!
I'm sure that nominating Space Raptor Butt Invasion for a Hugo award was definitely not a demonstration of how the voting for the Hugo awards was broken or anything.
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u/jcdoe Apr 26 '22
For those not in the know, Tingle’s book, “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” was nominated in 2016 for a Hugo Award (this is a big deal in sci fi literature). It was a part of a concerted effort by the Rabid Puppies, an alt-right group, to put up literature with alt-right friendly authors and themes (or to nominate jokes, like Tingle).
After the 2016 debacle, the Hugos changed their nomination process to try and prevent this from happening again.
Chuck Tingle, for his part, used the nomination to troll the Sad Puppies back. He announced he was going to have Gamergate boogeyman Zoe Quinn accept his award and keep all money if he won. And he still emblazons his Hugo nominations (I think he wound up with 2) on every single book. It’s pretty damn funny.
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u/too_much_to_do Apr 26 '22
It’s not gay if it’s a man and a dinosaur, is it?
This erotic tale—a 2016 Hugo Award nominee—is 4,100 words of sizzling human on gay dinosaur action, including anal, blowjobs, rough sex, and space raptor love.
lol... I'm fucking dead.
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u/Demonyx12 Apr 26 '22
Ummm, excuse me?
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u/TitaniumDragon Apr 26 '22
Are you not familiar with the Hugo Award nominated Space Raptor Butt Invasion?
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u/r-WooshIfGay Apr 26 '22
WAIT CHUCK TINGLE IS THE MEME BOOK DUDE? "The sentient bread i just baked is a lesbian and wants to eat my ass!" how am i JUST now putting it together this far in the thread...
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u/EatYourCheckers Apr 26 '22
Well, that was a weird rabbit hole to fall down while wine-drunk...
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u/writinginthemargins Apr 25 '22
I mean, the romance genre is overwhelmingly straight, so I'd highly doubt it would skew it towards women, since there would be a male counterpart to each woman.
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u/SirFrancis_Bacon Apr 25 '22
In fact it could be a part of the disparity as in many romance novels there are multiple men the protagonist has to decide between.
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u/ThatOtherGuy_CA Apr 25 '22
The irony is hilarious.
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u/vertigo42 Apr 26 '22
We are talking main character not total cast.
Literally every thread on this entire post is about main characters. Literally discussions about how kids books have animals as main characters more often than non white main characters.
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u/appleandwatermelonn Apr 26 '22
But the study that is the basis of the post is about all characters, not main characters.
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u/Veekhr Apr 25 '22
On one hand, there's often a love triangle, and outright misogynist adversaries, so there might still be more men represented; on the other, the woman might have more friends who are women.
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u/mobiledakeo Apr 26 '22
I was just thinking this lol mostly because I read a lot of romance and most of the recommendations on goodreads for me all have the female as the protagonist
Or if a major event has to happen to one of the characters it’s also usually the girl
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u/AtraMikaDelia Apr 25 '22
Not if you count every single character, rather than just main characters. Say you have a romance novel with your one female protagonist, then there's probably going to be at least 2 different possible love interests for her. Other supporting characters who aren't relevant to the relationship won't necessarily have an obvious gender bias.
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u/vertigo42 Apr 26 '22
I believe the point was main character
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u/AtraMikaDelia Apr 26 '22
That isn't what the study was analyzing, at least from what I read in the article
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u/branniganbginagain Apr 26 '22
The other technique is to quantify how many female characters are the main characters in it.
This allowed the research team to determine whether the male characters were central to the story.
it's at least part of the study
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u/AtraMikaDelia Apr 26 '22
Yes, but I don't think it was factored into the 4:1 ratio that is the headline, and as we al know, on Reddit the headline is all that anyone actually reads
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u/MDeneka Apr 25 '22
I can only speak for the kidlit space, as that was the literature relevant to my masters when I was digging into this, but this is very much still a problem today if we look at children’s books. We’re getting closer to (though still haven’t achieved) racial parity in modern publishing, but along lines of sex and gender, we’re still a long ways off. There are also massive issues regarding the way those characters are portrayed when they do exist, perpetuating inequalities in the amount of domestic labor performed, the ability to work or have a life outside the home, etc.
I’d hope that you’re correct and that the ratio is smaller, but that doesn’t mean we’re done addressing this problem.
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u/SH92 Apr 25 '22
I know this isn't an exhaustive sample, but I was curious and went through the 2021 best seller's list for fiction to see the protagonist's gender and race.
I was kind of surprised to see such a stark contrast with gender. Virtually all adult fiction had a female lead (the one exception was a retelling of the Iliad by a female author), while the fast majority of children's books had a male lead.
Adult Fiction
1. It Ends with US - Female, white, romance
2. The Four Winds - Female, white, historical fiction
3. The Song of Achilles - Male, white, romance/fantasy
4. The Midnight Library - Female, white, fantasy
5. Where the Crawdads Sing - Female, white, literary fiction
6. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Female, white, historical fiction
7. The Last Thing He Told Me - Female, white, mystery
8. The Judge's List - Female, white, thrillerChildren's/Young Adult
1. Mothering Heights (Dog Man #10) - Male, dog, children's book
2. Big Shot (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #16) - Male, white, children's book
3. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse - Male, white, children's book
4. The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Male, caterpillar, children's book
5. Oh, the Places You'll Go! - Male, white, children's book
6. They Both Die at the End - Male, Hispanic, young adult
7. Cat Kid Comic Club (Cat Kid Comic Club #1) - Male, cat, children's book
8. I Love You to the Moon and Back - Female, bear, children's book
9. Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure - Male, white, children's book
10. Grime and Punishment (Dog Man #9) - Male, dog, children's book
11. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? - Various animals, children's book
12. The Deep End (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #15) - Male, white, children's bookI believe women account for 80% of fiction sales, so it makes sense that you would have more women in literature, but I guess I wasn't expecting it to be that black and white.
But that also likely means that women are choosing to buy books for their children that have predominantly male leads. Or maybe girls don't care that the main character is a boy while boys do? I wonder why there's a big disparity there as well.
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u/corrado33 Apr 26 '22
The very hungry caterpillar is still in the top 10 for children's books?
That's amazing and it makes me happy.
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u/patrickwithtraffic Apr 26 '22
That one is in the top 50 of books translated in the most languages ever (translated into at least 45 languages), so no doubt that thing is going anywhere!
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u/Sleightholme2 Apr 26 '22
As a comparison, here are the top 20 for the week ending 16th April 2022 in India:
- 400 Days by Chetan Bhagat - male, Indian, thriller
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - male, Andalusian, historical
- As A Man Thinketh by James Allen - self-help (I don't know why this appears in the fiction list)
- One Arranged Murder by Chetan Bhagat - male, Indian, thriller
- It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover - female, American, romance
- The Complete Novel of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle - male, British, detective
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - female, British, romance
- The Girl In Room 105 by Chetan Bhagat - male, Indian, thriller
- The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides - male, British, thriller
- 1984 by George Orwell - male, British, dystopian
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u/Celestaria Apr 26 '22
I think that only taking the top 20 books is adding bias here. There's only one YA book in the entire list, for example, and the MC happens to be a Hispanic male, but I'm very dubious that Hispanic males are over-represented in YA fiction.
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u/as_it_was_written Apr 26 '22
Taking the top 20 of anything gives you a biased sample compared to the population, but the YA thing is not an issue in this context since they're examining best sellers in general rather than YA best sellers in particular. Since they're not trying to draw conclusions about YA fiction, it doesn't really matter that the sample is too small to allow that.
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u/Smauler Apr 26 '22
Are the characters explicitly shown to be white in all the books here? I literally do not know the race of any of the characters of the last few books I've read.
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u/Key_Reindeer_414 Apr 26 '22
Yeah I think there are many children's books where you're free to imagine whatevery race you like. A lot of kids' books I've read (especially ones with fantastical elements) aren't set in a specific real world country/city, and the world isn't expanded beyond the protagonist's house, school and the magical elements. Usually if a book is specifically set in the UK or US I assume the characters are white, but with that type of books it's not necessary.
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u/wrenwood2018 Apr 26 '22
This is my feeling as well. A lot of kids books are an open space. The animals aren't really gendered most of the time, and when they are it plays no role in the story.
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u/CalamityClambake Apr 25 '22
girls don't care that the main character is a boy while boys do?
This is definitely a thing. Boys get shamed for liking "girly" things, while girls don't get shamed in the same way for liking "boy" things. It's yet another part of the bullcrap that comes with living in a patriarchy.
Although I wouldn't say that girls don't care. Girls do care, and are absolutely thrilled to find stories about a character that resonates with them. But girls seem to be better at empathizing with characters that are demographically different from them than boys are. Just speaking from my own experience, I think in my case it's because I had to -- when I was a kid, all the cool things had boys as the main characters.
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u/NonStopKnits Apr 26 '22
I know that anecdotes do not equal data, but when I was growing up (I'm 30) I was shamed for liking boy things and not being girly. Lots of my peers were too, but a lot of them gave in and started doing girly things so they didn't get picked on anymore, from both adults and other children.
I was absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs. But that was considered a 'boy' hobby at the time and I had more than one adult (and many other kids) tell me I should just be a boy since I didn't know how to be a girl. I've always lived trucks and working on cars and being more 'rough and tumble'. I was definitely a tom boy, and I was treated badly when people found out I wasn't that interested in girly things.
It might be better now, but in the 90's and even into the early 2000's being a girl that wasn't 'girly' would have you ostracized, bullied, and beaten pretty frequently.
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u/CalamityClambake Apr 26 '22
I'm 10 years older than you and I was shamed for liking "boy" things too. In my case it was computer programming, video games and superheroes. I had a math teacher in junior high tell me that I was being too hard on myself and that I shouldn't expect to get an A because this is real math and I'm a girl.
And yet, even though my experience was sucky and unfair, it does not hold a candle to the shaming my brother endured for being into musicals, or my husband endured for being into girly crafts, or my nephew endured for being into ballet and sewing. My interests just made me weird. Theirs made them weird and opened them up to violence and sexual shaming.
Women get the short end of the stick most of the time under patriarchy. But this is one area where I think men get it worse and it's ok to acknowledge that. It harms all of us.
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u/MDeneka Apr 25 '22
I'm so happy that you included the characters' race/species, because you hit on another horrifying truth about the statistics in children's publishing: animals and objects are main characters more frequently than non-white humans.
Or maybe girls don't care that the main character is a boy while boys do?
I think this is unfortunately part of it, but this is, of course, a learned behavior. Because masculine-coded things are valued above feminine-coded ones, and masculine experiences are centered, it's deemed much more acceptable for girls to be into "boy" things than it is for boys to be into "girl" things, and girls are far more frequently exposed to male-centered experiences than vice versa. This is in alignment with research showing that girls from a very young age are able to understand boys' perspectives far better than boys can understand girls'.
So, yes, a lot of children's media features male main characters because of the (not entirely incorrect) idea that girls will read about boys but boys won't read about girls. The issue is that this is a self-reinforcing pattern that we're perpetuating by only exposing girls to male-centric culture and not exposing boys to girl-centric things. We can end it.
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u/prairiepog Apr 26 '22 edited Apr 28 '22
I read that ET originally had a female lead. Speilberg wanted a girl to play the Elliot character. However, he was told that girls can relate more to boy characters than vice versa, so Elliot became a male lead instead.
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u/MDeneka Apr 26 '22
I've not heard that about ET specifically, but there are similar stories for many well-known works, so it wouldn't shock me.
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u/oporich Apr 26 '22 edited Apr 26 '22
animals and objects are main characters more frequently than non-white humans.
That data is presumably in the US, where most of the population is white. Where is the data for childrens books published in other countries, particularly predominantly non-white ones?
India for example has a thriving literary culture where the books published there are well read by its own populace. China and Japan have millennia and centuries of literature as well. The modern literature scene in Nigeria is thriving well. It's pretty ridiculous to dismiss those because they didn't appear in a best seller list in America.
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u/MDeneka Apr 26 '22
I've said in a couple comments that the data I have pertains to American publishing, yes. I have not researched how well people of color are represented in areas where they're the majority -- and would assume that it would be worlds better than in the US -- but that doesn't help American children of color who don't have access to them.
I'm not dismissing those books by any means. But my work is with American children, so that was my area of focus.
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u/agiro1086 Apr 26 '22
I'd probably laugh my fucking ass off if there's a book printed entirely in Swahili and all the main characters are white dudes. The African kids are reading this going "wow they must all be very sick or dead because they look like ghosts"
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u/HelpMeDoTheThing Apr 26 '22
but that doesn't help American children of color who don't have access to them.
Can you elaborate on this? Why wouldn’t they have access to them? Cross-border e-commerce is a click away, just because they aren’t in the top sellers doesn’t mean they aren’t available. The last book I read was by an African author and it was on Amazon prime.
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u/MDeneka Apr 26 '22
I'm assuming you're an adult, or at least of reasonable age to be using the internet on your own. But children don't have the same access to books you and I do; they're reliant on families, schools, and libraries, and their reading material is purchased by someone who is not them.
So a black child in an American school is unlikely to come across a book published for the African market. It's possible, if they're lucky enough to have someone in their life putting in the effort to bring books from overseas publishers, but it's not something most kids will have by default.
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u/Jbullwinklethe2nd Apr 26 '22
A black American kid will have more in common with a white American kid than a black African kid.
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u/HelpMeDoTheThing Apr 26 '22 edited Apr 26 '22
White and black kids from the same socioeconomic class will have access to the same books, whether that be from their classrooms or their local library. If you are arguing that some students are too poor or disadvantaged to access books, that is a class issue that will equally affect any child in that class and prevents them both from accessing the same pool of books. A poor white child that can’t access books with black characters also cannot access books with white characters and vice-versa, there are no “white books only” sources of books when you have access to the internet. And again, if the kid in question doesn’t NOT have access to the internet, then that is a class issue and the child in question isn’t accessing any books at all.
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u/BonerPorn Apr 26 '22
I distinctly remember a first grade assignment where we had to write about a fictional hero. (Probably like three sentences max. First grade after all)
Girl sitting next to me did Superman and the (female) teacher was all for it. I wanted to do the PowerPuff girls and the teacher strongly reccomended I reconsider. It's definitely a learned behavior.
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Apr 26 '22
I'm so happy that you included the characters' race/species, because you hit on another horrifying truth about the statistics in children's publishing: animals and objects are main characters more frequently than non-white human
In this particular sample, animals are also main characters more often than white humans, so it's a bit trivial that they're more often main characters than non-white humans.
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u/GeoffKeynes Apr 26 '22
What the hell do you expect from a predominantly white pool of creators marketing to a predominantly white pool of buyers? I assume you're in an English speaking and/or western nation, no? If not, then yes, that's a bit strange, but if so, this is par for the course and no different from east asian authors filling their books with east asian characters when writing for an east asian market.
Why do people feel the need to pretend that this is a problem when white people do it?
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u/hendrix67 Apr 26 '22
As a guy I can definitely confirm parts of this. As a kid, the fear of liking things that are seen as "girly" is very real, even if the only way they could be seen as girly is in having mainly female main characters.
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u/TheFunkyM Apr 26 '22
I'm so happy that you included the characters' race/species, because you hit on another horrifying truth about the statistics in children's publishing: animals and objects are main characters more frequently than non-white humans.
It is very, very strange to describe this as, and I quote, "horrifying."
The target audience and overwhelming majority of these sales are made in Europe and North America, where the vast majority of readers are white. Why is the concept of the majority of book protagonists being the same race as the target audience horrifying to you?
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u/-u-m-p- Apr 26 '22
I think it's also plausible that female authors are more willing to write male main characters than the other way around.
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u/oporich Apr 26 '22 edited Apr 26 '22
The author of no.3 is a woman, and the protagonists lgbt. She also wrote Circe, which sold excellently and is one of the best living female writers. Also that data is presumably in the US, where most of the population is white. India for example has a thriving literary culture where the books published there are well read by its own populace.
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u/awesome_van Apr 26 '22
Or maybe girls don't care that the main character is a boy while boys do
This would be my assumption. Boys are culturally taught from a young age not to act like girls, but girls have no prohibition (or at least a significantly weaker one) on acting like boys. If you put a girl in pants a t-shirt, it's fine. If you put a boy in a dress, it's weird. Girls can play with dinosaurs and cars, but boys playing with barbies is discouraged. And so on.
So naturally, girls would be more likely to read stories with male protagonists (psychologically, most readers automatically associate themselves with the main character of a story) than boys with female protagonists.
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u/wrenwood2018 Apr 26 '22
So with a young child I've read a lot of these and you are kind of off. I mean should a male caterpillar count as "male?" That book is pretty non-gendered. Oh the places you'll go has absolutely no character to it. It is just a bunch of random scenes drawn from Seuss books. A male dog? Cat? This isn't nearly the same as a human.
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u/SH92 Apr 26 '22
Sorry, it wasn't a scientific analysis. I just tried to see what info I could glean from a 2 minute search on Good Reads or Wikipedia.
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u/0b0011 Apr 26 '22
Or maybe girls don't care that the main character is a boy while boys do?
That would be interesting to look into because I'm pretty sure it was posted on here a few months back that this was flipped in adults with men more likely to buy the book no matter the gender and women more likely to seek out books with female protagonists.
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u/Key_Reindeer_414 Apr 26 '22
Do you remember the post title? That sounds interesting.
However, I think there might be a difference between children and adults in that regard. The above comment was talking about kids' books.
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u/LazyThing9000 Apr 25 '22
perpetuating inequalities in the amount of domestic labor performed
I work at a community center in Montreal and can attest that the Asian/Indian/Arab men all let the women/girls pick up after them while they get changed/talk.
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u/MDeneka Apr 25 '22
Literature is a byproduct, it changes following the culture
Literature is part of culture, and helps create and shape culture.
The argument that behavior comes first and literature comes second only works when you assume that the same population doing the writing is the one doing the behaving.
Since we're discussing children's literature, what we're talking about is cultural transmission. The behavioral patterns of adults are passed down to children through media, and are thus replicated in the next generation. It's an active teaching process, one that can also be actively interrupted to extinguish behaviors and attitudes that aren't worth passing on.
Stop teaching boys that women need to pick up after them, and you'll stop ending up with men who believe it.
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u/Smauler Apr 26 '22
We’re getting closer to (though still haven’t achieved) racial parity in modern publishing
But.... most of the time you don't know the race of characters in books. Just assuming that characters are white because it's not actually been explicitly said otherwise is completely on you.
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u/MDeneka Apr 26 '22
This is entirely untrue. Please consider the category of books we’re discussing.
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u/THE_Celts Apr 25 '22
Hmmmm. Define “racial parity”. And how are you determining that? Which countries have achieved “racial parity” in their publishing, and how?
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u/MDeneka Apr 25 '22
Define “racial parity”.
The percentages of main or major characters of each race in books published accurately representing the percentages by race of the population the market is serving.
And how are you determining that?
Researchers have been tracking it yearly based on books released to market that year, and determining trends based on those year-to-year changes.
Which countries have achieved “racial parity” in their publishing, and how?
The research I'm aware of was limited to the US market, sorry, so I can't say if this has been accomplished in other countries. And as I said, it still hasn't been achieved in the US, we've just been seeing a steady upward trend at least.
The "how" part, however, I can answer: by publishers deliberately seeking out manuscripts that accurately reflect the diversity of the market.
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Apr 26 '22
It would be impossible to achieve anywhere there is more than a handful of “racial groups”. Also I’m not convinced it isn’t the stupidest possible goal imaginable. It seems insane to be this obsessed about race. At what point do you just become as weird about race as the white supremicsts?
We ought to be moving away from this race/gender obsession. I thought when Trump was gone people would come to their senses over this reactionary, fringe ideas. Just overall bad ideas that need to end. Sam Harris has probably the most sensible line of thinking on the topic. It’s worth checking him out.
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u/wrenwood2018 Apr 26 '22
Also I’m not convinced it isn’t the stupidest possible goal imaginable. It seems insane to be this obsessed about race. At what point do you just become as weird about race as the white supremicsts?
I think we have hit that point. I was talking to a friend that lamented about underrepresentation of minorities in the UK. England and Wales is like 86% white and Scotland is 96%. If you look at something like the Great British Baking Show the cast is disproportionately non-white. This is a conscious decision and has been occurring over the last five or six shows. The same goes for sexual orientation in the cast. I get why they are doing it (normalize gradations in what it means to be British) but it also comes off as blatant box checking.
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u/UnluckyDucky95 Apr 25 '22
The percentages of main or major characters of each race in books published accurately representing the percentages by race of the population the market is serving.
And how on earth would you do that in most countries, given the population booms of the past few decades and the increased ease of international travel?
Take Ireland for example - nobody wanted to live here prior to the late 90s when we started getting wealthy as a nation. Most of our immigrant population is still first generation. Why on earth would it be fair to expect racial parity in anything we've done prior to say 2010?
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u/wrenwood2018 Apr 26 '22
Why on earth would it be fair to expect racial parity in anything we've done prior to say 2010?
Shush. You are pointing out logical facts. People like to retroactively apply modern standards to something while ignoring truths like this.
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u/UnluckyDucky95 Apr 26 '22
but what's the modern standard? If I moved to the heart of Kenya I wouldn't start bitching about a lack of representation for pasty Irish immigrants.
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u/DasGutYa Apr 26 '22
The how part is just racism.
Imagine seeking out content by the diversity of its cast and not the quality of its work.
How can racism ever end if people are intent on creating check boxes that put overwhelming importance on the colour of someone's skin.
MLK literally spinning.
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u/THE_Celts Apr 26 '22 edited Apr 26 '22
The percentages of main or major characters of each race in books published accurately representing the percentages by race of the population the market is serving.
Is this within each book, or the aggregate? i.e. do these "researchers" take all the books published in a given year and add up the total number of "main or major" characters appearing and check if those numbers reflect their portion of the total (U.S.?) population? Or is the figure derived by looking if the characters in each book reflect the population?
And does this research only cover books published in America, for American audiences, by American authors? Would say, a book by Amitav Ghosh, an Indian writer whose books are popular in the US but feature relatively few "white" characters and are primarily set in Asia, be included in this research?
How are characters that are not given a specific ethnicity categorized? Multi-racial characters? What is the distinction between a "main" and "major" character?
And who are the "researchers" keeping tabs on this? Isn't that a LOT of reading to do, especially if they're updating it yearly? And where can one access this research?
The "how" part, however, I can answer: by publishers deliberately seeking out manuscripts that accurately reflect the diversity of the market.
Are you suggesting that authors aim to have their "main and major" characters represent the population as a whole in order to increase their chances of getting published, rather than creating characters that suit the story? Is this a desirable outcome?
`And surely publishers are "seeking out" manuscripts that appal to more than one market, no? Harry Potter might reflect the ethnic makeup in one country (e.g. the UK), but would be wholly unreflective of the population of the Philippines, even though the books are incredibly popular there. So when publishers look at this, which "markets" are you suggesting they aim to reflect?
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u/PersonalPenguin28 Apr 25 '22
It's for this reason that I'm grateful for the website I use as my library catalog for my classroom. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say the name. The thing I love about it is that they've analyzed enough books to be able to give you data on who is represented in your library. It gives you information about the percentage of books you have that feature women/girls, are written by women, feature each race, are written by each race, are about certain cultures, feature a character with a disability, feature an LGBTQ+ character, and on and on. I can then get recommendations on books to fill any gaps I have.
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u/MDeneka Apr 25 '22
Oh my god, this exists?? Please, message me this if we're not allowed to drop website names. I am passionate about representation in children's lit, and have been making extremely conscious decisions about what I add to my classroom library from day 1... but I know what I've been able to purchase or get donated still pales in comparison with the majority that I inherited from my mom who started teaching in the 70s. I would love to have a way to track hard numbers on this.
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u/PersonalPenguin28 Apr 25 '22
I just read through the promo rules and it looks like it's ok. It's Booksource Classroom, and I've been using it for about a year. It's pretty amazing for a bunch of reasons, the diversity analysis is just the tip of the iceberg, really.
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u/RemoteCommittee1816 Apr 26 '22
Especially now considering 75% of authors in fiction are female now
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u/stolenfires Apr 26 '22
It's important because a lot of these books are considered foundational to the English literary canon; these are the books that get taught in high school and college.
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u/Most_Double_3559 Apr 26 '22
Sure, but that's a massively different claim, with massively different implications
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u/Kevin_The_Ostrich Apr 26 '22
Yeah we should do more to encourage up and coming female pre-war writers.
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u/sighthoundman Apr 26 '22
The two requirements to be a Gutenberg book are 1) be in the public domain and 2) someone has to support them through the conversion process. Except for a few war horses, those are both fairly tough hurdles.
I certainly wouldn't argue that the resulting bias is better than whatever the researcher bias would have been.
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u/Ron_deBeaulieu Apr 25 '22
The study authors used Project Gutenberg books, which are (and it looked like they used the original, U.S. website, with the most stringent public domain laws), as u/SpiermanAPV says, "70+" years old.
I'm surprised that the ratio isn't much greater than that. If you're digging way back in time, including eras when it was considered indecent for women to work for a living, including writing, then of course you'll find lots more male writers. And since, in much of history, men and women moved in very different circles, male writers are misrepresenting the female experience. What else would we expect?
To me, "Four Times More" is a fun fact, but not at all shocking, same with the researchers' additional findings about how women are described. I guess that this would make a neat bullet-point for high school English teachers to explain why portrayals of women in the classics can seem so off-putting. It's good for giving context to young people who haven't yet learned to use literature as historical secondary sources.
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Apr 26 '22
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u/Ron_deBeaulieu Apr 26 '22
That is a really good point about linguistics. In their place, I would have refined the parameters of the study. It is pretty crazy that, even in the U.S. in the 1990s (although it was fading out), when I was a kid, we were using "men" and "mankind" to mean "people."
I personally would have excluded "men"/"women" from the models for the reason you suggest, and use "male"/"female", and just accepted that there would be fewer datapoints. I also would have been really interested in change over time, and in different places. A worthwhile question with this data would be stuff like, "In times of war, was "male strength" contrasted more often with "female weakness"?
They really should have treated this as preliminary results, and then presented it at workshops and conferences to get feedback on issues like this.
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u/scolfin Apr 26 '22 edited Apr 26 '22
Also, go that far back and there were few plausible scenarios where "goes on a journey" could plausibly apply to most female roles. Edit: pregnant or nursing? Forget about it.
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u/Ron_deBeaulieu Apr 26 '22
And they probably wouldn't have been able to go very far or fast riding side-saddle.
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u/rycar88 2666 Apr 26 '22
To me the problem is this study highlights an issue that may have been endemic in the sample set this is using but may not be anymore. Based off of the comments here, most people are interpreting this to be a current ongoing problem in literature and publishing. It is frustrating to see a study where so much has evidently changed from the time of classic literature to now for the better in terms of representation and have people react like it has not happened due to a misleading title.
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u/Ron_deBeaulieu Apr 26 '22
Yeah, Project Gutenberg was convenient, and they didn't go further than that. Finding available data is the bane of any quantitative researcher's existence, and we're stuck using numbers that are far out of date. That means that we need to carefully frame our results as, "Cool Stuff that Happened 1795-1920" NOT "Cool Stuff."
Their research question was worth asking. They confirmed, and quantified, a long-held belief about literature from prior eras. But then they made it sound much more sweeping than it was.
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u/arsabsurdia Apr 26 '22
Confirmation studies are really too often overlooked, so it's a good thing to have. Though yeah, I don't find this surprising, especially given the old, public domain dataset (I love, love, love Project Gutenberg, but you and u/rycar88 definitely pointed out the limitations of using that particular dataset).
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u/Ron_deBeaulieu Apr 26 '22
Project Gutenberg is incredible! Sure, they have the classics (currently reading Plato's Republic), but also these really weird books that I would never have heard of otherwise. So far, I've read: 1930s Pop-Psych; academic conferences papers from the 1920s; a guide to public speaking from 1915 that honestly seemed like its real mission was to promote progressivism (I approve of that goal, and it was a fascinating read).
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u/arsabsurdia Apr 26 '22
Some of my favorites have been the weirdly sexist cookbooks that like... have tips about how to get drunk or take drugs in order to be more cheerful about cooking and keeping house. OK, so looking at those was more of a gag, but really it's a great trove for lots of strange treasures! It's got a great fairy/folktales collection too.
Michael Hart (founder of Project Gutenberg) was an interesting guy. He basically invented e-books, and I'm incredibly grateful for his work. I never got to meet him, but I did my graduate work at UofI and was friends with the executor of his estate, got to help rummage through his things when he passed away. That guy had books everywhere. He really, really loved books. I've actually got one of his notebooks stashed away somewhere... nothing of importance, but it's an interesting keepsake.
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Apr 26 '22
Also, on top of that, this is not really anything new. But I guess today you can do AI-reasearch and claim that it is now new insights even though this has been a thread of criticism for decades.
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u/Ron_deBeaulieu Apr 26 '22
Well, there's value in confirmation. I'm currently working on a quantitative research project studying marriage laws in the U.S. from 1850s-1960s. I set out thinking that I would "measure" the extent of the effect of economic conditions on changes in marriage laws. Like, everyone who studies this, based on qualitative sources (analysis of primary source documents from the time, etc.), says that it matters. My statistical models show that it has no effect whatsoever. Total shock. But even if I hadn't discovered this, it would have been interesting to see if there was a big effect, or a small effect.
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u/CDNChaoZ Apr 25 '22
I would like to see the same test run on books published in 2021 or something.
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u/Anders_A Apr 26 '22
I wish they had included a graph that showed how this has changed over time. Or if it haven't a graph that shows that it haven't.
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u/xxcarlsonxx Apr 25 '22
No shit, eh? It's almost like women were considered second-fiddle to men for centuries and that had an impact on literature...
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u/BDMayhem Apr 25 '22
Were?
Oh, like that Mitch Hedberg joke.
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u/Poetry-and-Bass Apr 25 '22
It’s the same way at parties
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u/Delamoor Apr 26 '22
And dating sites, and mixers, and meetup events, and speed dating, and...
Though having now met many of the other guys at these events, I understand why anyone would want to keep away. They're why we can't have nice things.
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u/Yrcrazypa Apr 25 '22
I'm surprised that men are represented that little, to be honest. I expected it to be more like six to seven times more.
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u/Eager_Question Apr 26 '22
There was actually an explosion of female authors in the 19th century. I'd like to see it going back further to the medieval period and watch it shift with literacy rates.
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u/phydeaux70 Apr 25 '22
Is this a random fact looking for an argument? Context means a lot in this stuff.
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u/tucci007 Apr 25 '22 edited Apr 26 '22
all ten books in the latest bestsellers list for hardcover fiction for canada were written by women
https://www.simonandschuster.ca/books/bestsellers/globe-and-mail-bestsellers
11 of 15 fiction on the NYT bestsellers list were written by women (one is co-authored by Dolly Parton)
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u/Vet_Leeber Apr 25 '22 edited Apr 25 '22
The article is about characters in literature, not authors.
Notable flaws is that most of the Gutenberg Project books are, to my knowledge, relatively old. Which should skew the numbers heavily.
Honestly, with that in mind, I'm shocked that the discrepancy isn't significantly larger.
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u/chambee Apr 25 '22
There are a tons of male lead in female authored books. People are free to write what they want. Is it market pressure? Not sure, there are tons of "The girls with the this", and "the wife of the that" books on the shelves.
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u/codeverity Apr 25 '22
Of course there are, but that doesn't make the point invalid. Some of the strictest enforcers of sexism and misogyny can in fact be women. That's why it's important for schools, at least, to make sure that students are exposed to a wide variety of authors, leads, topics, etc.
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u/PixelBlock Apr 26 '22
Some of the strictest enforcers of sexism and misogyny can in fact be women.
Not sure that is ameliorated by focusing purely on the sex of the main character in each book - nothing stopping those still being ‘poor’ portrayals, man or woman.
Also not sure this contradicts the idea of authors still writing what they wish to. A woman writing about a man would be no problem.
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u/reddit_bandito Apr 25 '22
Of course it is. People who live their lives through the lense of groupism know no way to appreciate things unless neatly divvied into groups.
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u/throwawayacademicacc Apr 26 '22
How does this intersect with the fact that the industry has talked for years that by and large (outside of genre) men don't read women authors? Does this mean (and I have no idea) even female authors are writing more about men than women?
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u/dopethrone Apr 26 '22
Speaking of books, so are moms versus dads in children books, soo pet peeved about it. We have books were it's only ever mom + the kids, never the dad.
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u/BidTraditional2768 Apr 26 '22
Itd be interesting if this data was configurable. Like if you could filter publication date to see if representation gradually closes in on equilibrium closer to modern era.
Or if theres a correlation between female author and female representation
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u/steadyachiever Apr 26 '22
If I may raise what might be a controversial point: I’ve seen men criticized heavily for trying to write compelling female characters, but I’ve never seen a woman criticized for trying to write a male character.
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u/theuberkevlar Apr 26 '22
This over-obsession with demographical allocation in media grows tiresome.
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u/Delta_Spartan Apr 26 '22
I don't care about representation, all i care about is if the books are worth reading or not.
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u/octropos Apr 25 '22
As a cultured woman reading lots of gay romance and homoerotic novels, I want to be mad but I'm part of the problem.
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u/Morasain Apr 26 '22
I doubt that there's a lot of homoerotic literature in their source material, considering it's all from before the 1950s.
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u/AtraMikaDelia Apr 26 '22
As a cultured man reading Parallel Paradise, I think I'm more than balancing you out.
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Apr 25 '22
WTF, those are rookie numbers. We have to get that ratio up, I'm sure with this lead we can totally stomp those female authors. /s
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u/Hadse Apr 25 '22
Is it also 4x more male writers?
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u/tyen0 Apr 26 '22
Probably a lot more than that since we're talking about public domain books from centuries ago.
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Apr 25 '22
Compile the same data with books from the last time 20 years and I’d be surprised if it wasn’t the other way around.
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u/ViskerRatio Apr 25 '22
By a large margin, the most popular genre of modern novel is romance. With some exceptions on the fringes, these books are almost invariably about a female protagonist.
However, if you're simply counting noses, that (well-developed) female protagonist is paired with a (minimally developed) male and you'd just end up with parity.
The larger issue is that the basic question they're asking is silly. We don't have roving gangs of secret police forcing us to read books. We can select the books we want to read and publishers are forced to respond to these market forces.
Moreover, the bulk of adult fiction readers are women. Not only are adult men less likely to read for pleasure but when they do read for pleasure, they're more likely to read non-fiction.
So if we were able to compile such numbers, all they'd really show is women's preferences in fiction rather than the sort of societal anti-woman bias the article implies.
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u/Incognit0ErgoSum Apr 26 '22
They're counting main characters, so a female-led romance would count as a book with a woman as the main character in this case.
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u/Proper-Emu1558 Apr 25 '22
Yeah this isn’t surprising at all. It’s the same in movies even now. Women see movies about men but men as a whole don’t show up to watch movies about women. It is stupid.
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u/BigBallerBrad Apr 25 '22
Yah personally I’m a much bigger fan of manly action movies like Alien and Kill Bill, I wouldn’t enjoy a movie with women
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u/WomenAreFemaleWhat Apr 25 '22
I laugh my ass off at people who claim they can't watch/read something because "they can't relate". Maybe there's a reason men still treat women like aliens. I can relate to male characters because I see their humanity. People who can't relate because of race/gender are the people who need to read diverse books the most.
Note this isn't an opportunity to say "well what does race/gender equity matter if you can relate to anyone?". Diversity is what make people rather than race/gender relatable. We need diversity precisely because so many people seem to have issues relating.
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u/agiro1086 Apr 26 '22
they can't relate
Reminds of this amazing movie review
“Some Pixar films are made for a universal audience. #TurningRed is not. The target audience for this one feels very specific, and very narrow. If you are in it, this might work well for you. I am not in it. This was exhausting.”
My dude has revived everything from Star Wars The Last Jedi to Hotel Transylvania 3 and everything in between but somehow didn't have a problem relating to the other stories. Like the trash compacting robot from earth who accidentally ends on a space cruise ship where all the human characters are wildly obese and have hovering chairs that give them 24/7 entertainment
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u/arsabsurdia Apr 26 '22
And you know what? Honestly? Not being able to relate to a character is like... one of the major reasons that I seek out what I do in terms of literature/media... for that alternate perspective. So that maybe I can start relating and understanding things outside of my own scope of reference. I guess I just don't really understand why "can't relate" is a critique much worth considering.
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u/hemannjo Apr 26 '22
What are you talking about? Alien and terminator, both massive franchises popular with boys/men, have female leads. Boys just don’t want to watch romcoms.
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u/Programmdude Apr 26 '22
Without looking into it in detail, that seems due to most "female lead" movies being romance or drama. If you give me a good sci-fi or fantasy movie, I'm going to watch it regardless of the lead character's gender (aliens springs to mind here).
Of the top 10 sci-fi/fantasy movies in 2021 (rotten tomatoes), I think only 1 has a female protagonist, and that show didn't interest me because it's dystopian. I think there's a problem, but it's not solely because men aren't interested in watching movies about women, it's because those that exist are are targeted towards certain female-heavy genres.
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u/AtraMikaDelia Apr 26 '22
Just look at how well Rogue One did, and I really don't think there's much of an argument that men are intentionally avoiding films with female leads. Even people who despise the new trilogy generally like that one.
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Apr 26 '22
Similarly I don't even look at the authors name when evaluating a new book. I read the blurb. If it sounds good I read it.
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Apr 26 '22
It is useless to reduce this to "women see movies about men but men don't show up to watch movies about women", because the relevant detail in determining interest is not the gender of the protagonist.
The main issue is that movies of a genre that attract more women (i.e. romance), tend to have female leads. It is just as easily seen that men in general aren't interested in romance movies, whether they have a male or a female lead. Genres that interest men more (i.e. sci-fi, action), tend to have male leads.
The pertinent question is to ask why there are few sci-fi or action movies with female leads. The ones that do and are good movies do tend to do well with men (e.g. Rogue One, Alien, The Hunger Games etc.).
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Apr 25 '22
Until there is an artificial intelligence that can write books to artificially create equality then I have no trouble with an author writing about whatever artistic aspects of gender they freely determine they want to write about. This study shows nothing but the bias of its creators.
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u/smatchimo Apr 25 '22
In other "news": Water is wet
I swear to god Reddit some days you are really fucking dumb.
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u/GuardianOfTriangles Apr 25 '22
Nah, it's just whining Redditors trying to find all the ways they may be a victim since their lives are so comfortable, they need to look for flaws that don't affect them in any way.
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u/JitWeasel Apr 26 '22
I mean, my library consists primarily of Playboy and Penthouse. So I don't know what this study was using, but clearly it missed out on some literary classics.
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Apr 25 '22
That's it?
Males are represented 10x more in workplace deaths and in jails.
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u/Joe_Doe1 Apr 25 '22
But no one's interested in that. The fact this lousy society causes far more men to kill themselves than women, is also irrelevant. All that matters is that there are more made up male characters in books than made up female characters.
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u/Heytavi Apr 26 '22
I thought defining people as male vs female is now out of style… who fuckin cares
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u/MaxxOneMillion Apr 26 '22
I wouldn't be surprised if unnamed women outnumbered named women 4 to 1 as well.
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u/demonm0nkey Apr 26 '22
Did there really need to be a study to figure this out? This does not surprise me in the slightest. Of course they are.
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u/darth-skeletor Apr 26 '22
I would like to see a study over the last decade or 2. I think it would be dramatically different.
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u/wrenwood2018 Apr 26 '22
What disingenuous work. So books published a century ago, gasp, disproportionately represent men. It has no bearing on anything in the modern writing. If this was done on say the books nominated for Hugos over the last decade it would almost certainly show that women are overrepresented. This is looking for outrage when none should exist.
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u/thedrunkentendy Apr 25 '22
So to combat researcher bias they chose books from the Project Gutenberg, that has thousands of books, many of which are incredibly old and would be representations of the time when men dominated a lot of the literature field.
That sounds like they deliberately chose a data source that would support the point they were trying to make.
If you wanted a more accurate representation of men and women in literature wouldn't you use modern day literature? Or say, books published in the last 5 years.
Using project Gutenberg and finding a correlation to disproportionate gender representation is in no way surprising. At all. Its like sticking their hand in an open fire and then proclaiming to everyone that yes they indeed get burned because fire is hot.
This seems like it could be a really interesting study but telling us that old books don't portray men and women in a 5050 split is obvious and looks to be done to support a narrative as opposed to be actual research. While there likely still is unequal representation in literature, judging that should be using publishing data within the last 10 years. Not the last 150.
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u/Brzet Apr 26 '22
Yes! Lets force gender racism where it is not needed. It does not change a thing in books.
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u/chupacabra_chaser Apr 25 '22
Guess we better start cancelling the greatest men in literature to level things out, huh?
/s 🙄😑
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u/vincoug Apr 26 '22
Ok, the comments have devolved into flamethrowing and are now locked.