De invloed van het gender van auteurs op de literaire waardering van hun teksten

Samenvatting

Male-authored books are generally rated higher than books written by women; witness, for instance, the 2017 list of ‘Best Books’ in de Volkskrant, where out of 51 books, only 8 were authored by women. In order to examine whether male-authored texts are actually different from female-authored texts, this article examines whether readers can derive the author’s gender from two paragraphs of anonymous text, whether a computer programme can derive the author’s gender from a corpus of texts, and whether a gendered author’s name has any effect on the evaluation of the text’s literary quality by non-professional readers. Results show that readers are able to derive the author’s gender from a small fragment of text. This is in contrast with computerized research, which shows mixed results across corpora. Finally, the name of the author does not seem to have an effect on the evaluation of the literary quality.