ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
The gender agency gap in fiction writing (1850 to 2010).
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Gender shapes the relationship between productivity and journal prestige in science.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Structural roles and gender disparities in corruption networks.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The gender agency gap in fiction writing (1850 to 2010).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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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.
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