ITHACA, N.Y. – In the publishing industry, there's a common belief that men won't read novels about women, but new research out of Cornell University 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 and co-author of " Causal Effect of Character Gender on Readers' Preferences ." "That is contrary to the limited existing literature and contrary to widespread industry assumptions."
Studies have shown that novels by men featured more male characters compared to books written by women, said Federica Bologna , a doctoral student in information science and the study's lead author. 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, the researchers recruited almost 3,000 participants – 1,492 women and 1,491 men – and asked them to read two short 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.
In future work, the researchers hope to explore the preferences of nonbinary readers and to study whether the same assumptions about men's preferences are causing creators to avoid female protagonists in other types of media, including video games.
