Note that this article isn't just about romance, though there is a lot about occupations in romance because "In Section 3.4, I compare occupational portrayals in romance novels to three datasets reporting real-world rankings of desirability in romantic partners by gender and occupation". It's based on analysis of "1181 novels that appeared on Anglo-American bestseller lists during 2023–2024."
Here's the abstract:
I analyze how occupations are portrayed in contemporary popular fiction by coding the protagonists’ and love interests’ professions in 1181 bestselling novels from 2023–2024. Using large language model–assisted extraction with human oversight, I map which roles dominate across genres and compare them to real-world occupational data. The results show that fiction highlights a narrow set of archetypes—e.g., students, writers, detectives, athletes—while downplaying most everyday forms of labor. Overrepresentation is shaped partly by prestige: higher-status jobs are somewhat more likely to be emphasized, but many exceptions remain, with some prestigious professions underrepresented (e.g., tech executives and engineers) while low-prestige but narratively useful roles (e.g., hunters, antique dealers) are prominent. In romance titles, occupational portrayals diverge sharply by gender: men are written into positions of power, danger, or transgression, while women are more often portrayed in expressive or domestic roles. Comparing these fictional portrayals to survey and dating-app data on occupational desirability reveals consistent gaps, underscoring how cultural products use work as symbolic resources for storytelling and signaling desirability rather than mirroring labor markets.
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The professions assigned to protagonists and love interests in novels [...] signal more than just character backstory: they reveal symbolic hierarchies of labor, prestige, and aspiration. A detective, a doctor, or a florist is never a neutral occupational choice but a shorthand for competence, authority, glamour, or ordinariness.
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fiction privileges rare or symbolically charged occupations while underrepresenting the everyday work that sustains most lives. Prestige plays a role but is not determinative: high-status jobs such as tech executives or engineers are often sidelined, while lower-prestige but narratively useful roles such as hunters or crime bosses are foregrounded. Romance genres further highlight gender asymmetries, with men portrayed in roles tied to power, danger, and transgression, while women appear in roles emphasizing youth, creativity, or domesticity. These divergences between fiction, real-world prevalence, and stated romantic partner preferences highlight how occupations function as a symbolic resource in storytelling, reflecting cultural narratives of work, status, and desire.
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some roles are tightly bound to genre conventions while others cut across boundaries. Detectives anchor mystery, secret agents cluster in thrillers, royalty in fantasy romance, and warriors in fantasy.
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the genre of romance (and its offshoot fantasy romance) warrants closer attention, given its direct ties to aspirational and gendered portrayals of professions. Because these dynamics are especially pronounced and occupy a large share of the dataset (27% of books), I examine romance and fantasy romance in greater detail
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A different pattern emerges in fantasy romance. Roles such as warrior, royalty, healer, and witch/wizard introduce fantasy-world institutions that allow for more mixed gender associations. Some skews persist (e.g., warriors are predominantly men, healers more often women), but the overall distribution is less rigid. In this sense, romance codifies occupational identity into conventional gendered tropes, while fantasy romance destabilizes them, opening more space for variation beyond conventional gender sorting.
Note that this article isn't just about romance, though there is a lot about occupations in romance because "In Section 3.4, I compare occupational portrayals in romance novels to three datasets reporting real-world rankings of desirability in romantic partners by gender and occupation". It's based on analysis of "1181 novels that appeared on Anglo-American bestseller lists during 2023–2024."
Here's the abstract:
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