Getting Her Off: Looking at Women Authors in Romance Compared to Other Fiction Genres

Here's the abstract:

The present study explores women authors in fiction, specifically the romance genre, and how gender discrimination affects them. The factors studied were the price of books within the romance genre compared to other genres, societal factors affecting women authors, and discrimination within publishing. This study is an expansion and replication of the study done by Weinberg and Kapelner (2018) which looked at the discrimination against gender in the publishing industry. A common theme in the literature is that women authors are overlooked and underrepresented in genres that are not romance. This dismissal of women authors leads the romance genre to be an under researched genre. Another common theme explored in this paper was the idea that women authors are shoed into certain genres because of their gender not based on their abilities. A price analysis was conducted on a dataset of books published from 2000-2023 from Kaggle cross-referenced with a name by gender dataset, also from Kaggle. It was found that there was a significant price difference between male dominated, female dominated, and mixed genres (p=0.000) and that there is a significant relationship between author gender and the categories that they write in (p=0.000). This research confirms that there still is gender discrimination prevalent in publishing, and it effects the genres that women authors publish in.

A fair number of the figures about sales figures are taken (with acknowledgement) from a newsletter written by Andrea Martucci. Since this is not strictly an academic publication, it does not have an individual entry in the database, but I thought it would be worth inserting a direct link to an archived version of it here.