In the publishing industry, there's a common belief that men won't read novels about women, but new research out of Cornell finds just the opposite.
In the first large-scale study of its kind, men were equally willing to continue reading a story that featured a woman as the main character as one with a man. Women, however, showed a slight preference for reading stories about other women.
"This supposed preference among men for reading about men as characters just isn't true. That doesn't exist," said Matthew Wilkens, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. "That is contrary to the limited existing literature and contrary to widespread industry assumptions."
Federica Bologna, a doctoral student in the field of information science and lead author on the new work, presented the study, "Causal Effect of Character Gender on Readers' Preferences," at the Conference on Computational Humanities Research, Dec. 10.
Literary fiction has long been a man's world. From the early 1800s until just a few years ago, men wrote a majority of the novels, with women finally penning at least 50% in 2020. Studies have shown that novels by men featured more male characters compared to books written by women, Bologna said. More than 80% of the top novels are written by men, and historically, men have been more likely to win literary awards.
Some previous research has suggested that men strongly prefer men as protagonists, while women will read about any gender, said Wilkens. However, these studies were practically "anecdotes" and included just a few dozen individuals.
For the new study, researchers recruited almost 3,000 participants - 1,492 women and 1,491 men - and asked them to read two 500-word stories, one about a hike, and another that took place at a coffee shop. Both stories' main characters had gender-neutral names - Sam and Alex, respectively. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to read the hike story with he/him pronouns and the coffee shop story with she/her pronouns. For the other half, the pronouns were switched. After reading the two stories, participants were asked which one they wanted to keep reading.
About three-quarters of the men picked the hike story regardless of whether it featured a man or woman as the protagonist. Women, however, chose the hike story when Sam was a woman 77% of the time, but only 70% of the time when Sam was a man.
"Readers are pretty flexible," Wilkens said. "Give them interesting stories, and they will want to read them."
Bologna hopes this work will encourage the publishing industry to promote more books with a variety of girl and women characters. "It's just nice to see multiple perspectives and takes on womanhood," she said.
In future work, they hope to explore the preferences of nonbinary readers (they were unable to recruit as many people identifying as nonbinary, gender fluid or gender queer for this study as they'd wanted), and to study whether the same assumptions about men's preferences is causing creators to avoid female protagonists in other types of media.
"Games are a huge industry and a huge mode of storytelling these days," Wilkens said. "We don't know if our results extend straightforwardly to games, but it's important to think about those same questions across other media, because stories are told in a lot of different places now."
Ian Lundberg, formerly an assistant professor of information science, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a co-author on the study.
Funding for the research came from the Department of Information Science at Cornell and the California Center for Population Research.
Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
