Somebody actually compiled this utter cack.
Researchers using AI technologies have discovered that male characters are four times more prevalent in literature than female characters.
Mayank Kejriwal at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering was inspired by work on gender biases and his own work on natural language processing to carry out the experiment.
Kejriwal and fellow researcher Akarsh Nagaraj used data from 3,000 books that are part of the Gutenberg Project, across genres including adventure, science fiction, mystery and romance.
Jesus! What a waste of time and effort. And who cares? It’s fiction. Read it if you like it and don’t if you don’t. No one is being forced.
The study used Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify gender-specific characters by looking at things including female and male pronouns. The researchers also examined how many female characters were main characters.
“Gender bias is very real, and when we see females four times less in literature, it has a subliminal impact on people consuming the culture,” said Kejriwal. “We quantitatively revealed an indirect way in which bias persists in culture.”
Bollocks.
Kejriwal said: “When we published the dataset paper, reviewers had this criticism that we were ignoring non-dichotomous genders. But we agreed with them, in a way. We think it’s completely suppressed, and we won’t be able to find many [transgender individuals or non-dichotomous individuals].”
Probably because most consumers of fiction aren’t interested in pretentious woke wank, they just want to read a good story.
As an aside, my protagonists vary – I tend to alternate between a male and female lead with each novel. Because I like doing so. But that’s just me. My current novel, Renegade is still with Legiron Books. Things have been delayed somewhat due to unavoidable circumstances.
Here, Sir, the google ngram thing will do he, she, him, her in two minutes.
Can I get a grant for more, do you think.
Gutenberg Project is old out of copyright books. Women were mostly still housewves then. Obvious most charachters would be men
Also, any book about war, military, industry, politics, science, spies, cops… will be predominatly male. A book centered on HR Dept won’t sell. However St Trinians series did do well
And our taxes pay for this nonsense
“…when we see females four times less in literature, it has a subliminal impact on people consuming the culture.”
This is definitely nonsense. People choose which books they want to read. The reason for his perceived bias is that more people choose to read more books with predominately male characters. He has his cause and effect the wrong way around. It wouldn’t surprise me if he set off with his conclusion written up before he even started.
Good luck getting a job in engineering with this cack on your CV. If you do get a job you will need to keep an eye out for that gender bias in your workplace.
I think that these chaps / chapesses / whatever have made gender assumptions. Based on superficial evidence.
Tut, tut.
Brontes?
Austen?
Just did a quick search wit google.
how many books were written by women
About 7,870,000,000 results
how many books were written by men
About 13,270,000,000 results
Would anyone reasonably expect a man to write about women characters?
I do.
How long before you get cancelled for sexual appropriation?
Let ’em try.
The Hornblower stories may make more interesting reading if the ships were crewed solely by women. “I’ll show these pesky pirates a thing or two, or my name’s not Hortense Hornblower”.
There is evidence that women served below decks in Nelson’s navy. As for pirates, women took that role as well – see Anne Bonney and Mary Reid for example.