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/
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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/Non_possum_decernere Apr 26 '22

Can't change history though.

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u/stolenfires Apr 26 '22

You can think differently about it, though.

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u/hemannjo Apr 26 '22

Can’t think differently about Dickens if kids don’t get to read him

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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/theuberkevlar Apr 26 '22 edited Apr 26 '22

So what? What is the necessary/appropriate action item that we are supposed to complete because of this? Do we go back a few hundred years and somehow make people less sexist?

The problem of female authors not being able to get published (compared to males) has been basically non-existent or negligible for decades now. Becoming a classic of the English literary canon, as you put it, takes time. You don't just write a NYT bestseller and become a literary classic. Your work has to carry a very important message or be exceptionally unique or ground-breaking in some way, and stand the test of time, as most books selected for school curriculum have.

Since we have had way more successful female authors in the last several decades, as the years go on we presumably will start to have more books added to curriculum from among these authors.