The gender agency gap in fiction writing (1850 to 2010)

Oscar Stuhler

doi:10.1073/pnas.2319514121

The gender agency gap in fiction writing (1850 to 2010)

Oscar Stuhler^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Sociology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Works of fiction play a crucial role in the production of cultural stereotypes. Concerning gender, a widely held presumption is that many such works ascribe agency to men and passivity to women. However, large-scale diachronic analyses of this notion have been lacking. This paper provides an assessment of agency attributions in 87,531 fiction works written between 1850 and 2010. It introduces a syntax-based approach for extracting networks of character interactions. Agency is then formalized as a dyadic property: Does a character primarily serve as an agent acting upon the other character or as recipient acted upon by the other character? Findings indicate that female characters are more likely to be passive in cross-gender relationships than their male counterparts. This difference, the gender agency gap, has declined since the 19th century but persists into the 21st. Male authors are especially likely to attribute less agency to female characters. Moreover, certain kinds of actions, especially physical and villainous ones, have more pronounced gender disparities.

Original language	English (US)
Article number	e2319514121
Journal	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume	121
Issue number	29
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2319514121
State	Published - Jul 16 2024

Funding

I would particularly like to thank Bart Bonikowski, Paul DiMaggio, Patrick Kaminski, Carly Knight, John Levi Martin, Friedemann Melcher, and Iddo Tavory for their engagement with prior versions of this manuscript. This research also benefited from comments received at NYU Sociology\u2019s Culture Workshop, the Organizational Behavior Seminars at Stanford, the Culture and Action Network workshop at the University of Chicago, and the Institute for Analytical Sociology Seminar at Link\u00F6ping University. While not directly involved in this project, this work would not have been possible without resources developed by David Bamman, Hoyt Long, and Ted Underwood. I\u2019m also indebted to Ryan Dubnicek and Boris Capitanu at the HathiTrust Research Center, as well as to the anonymous reviewers.

Keywords

agency
gender
social networks
syntax
text analysis

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1073/pnas.2319514121

Cite this

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The gender agency gap in fiction writing (1850 to 2010)

Abstract

Funding

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

UN SDGs

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