Female authors of fiction often perceive themselves to be undervalued in relation to their male counterparts. What is not clear is whether this preference for male authors comes from readers or publishers. Two pre-registered studies examined how university students evaluated book passages attributed to either male or female authors, and investigated whether negative evaluations of romance novels are based on their association with women. In Study 1, participants read identical passages attributed to either male or female authors and evaluated them. Study 2 extended this work by adding attributions of genre: either romance or literary fiction. Linear mixed-effects modeling and Bayesian analyses were employed to analyze these data. Study 1 demonstrated little preference for books attributed to males over females and Bayesian analyses confirmed support for the null in most cases. The results of Study 2 similarly suggested that author gender and genre attributions do not have a strong influence on evaluations.
The quotes I've included are from one of the versions of the paper above, prior to it receiving its correct pagination, so I've not included page numbers with the quotations.
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This study tested two competing hypotheses. The first was that male authors would be rated higher than female authors regardless of genre, suggesting that the derogation of romance novels is due to its association with women. Second, that romance novels would be rated lower than literary fiction novels regardless of author attribution, suggesting that romance novels are inherently of poorer quality. Overall neither of these hypotheses were supported. The results of this study suggest that the respondents did not differ in their evaluations of fiction excerpts based on whether it was attributed to either male or female authors or to the romance or literary fiction genres.
The lack of differences in evaluation based on genre observed here is interesting given the seemingly universal low regard for romance novels. If participants judge excerpts attributed to romance as equivalent to those attributed to literary fiction when the text is identical, then it appears the mere label of “romance” is not enough to lead participants to believe the writing must be poor. During debriefing, multiple participants mentioned that they did not think the passages were particularly romantic given that they were ostensibly from romance novels. In truth, only one of the passages was actually taken from a romance novel.
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Note that last caveat!
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Because the main goal of this study was to examine the influence of paratextual information (i.e., attributions of genre and author gender), it was not our aim to have participants evaluate actual passages from romance novels. Thus, participant judgments seem to have been based primarily on the actual content of the passage, rather than the genre to which they were attributed. It may be that romance novels are inherently of lower quality than other genres and, had more passage from romance novels been included, those would have been rated lower regardless of the attributed genre. In addition, rather than the writing, it may be the actual subject matter or content of romance novels that people find objectionable.
Here's the abstract:
The quotes I've included are from one of the versions of the paper above, prior to it receiving its correct pagination, so I've not included page numbers with the quotations.
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Note that last caveat!
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