Gender associations in the twentieth-century English-language literature

Publication date: Available online 24 May 2019Source: Journal of Research in PersonalityAuthor(s): Daniel Schulz, Štěpán BahníkAbstractGender associations may be partly learned from print media, including literature. Using Google Books Ngram corpus, we explored the depiction of male and female characters in the twentieth-century English-language fiction. By analyzing adjective-noun bigrams, we examined adjectives used in association with “man”, “woman”, “boy”, and “girl”. Men were described in more positive terms than women. Girls were depicted more positively than boys at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the tendency reversed in the middle of the century. Boys were described in more masculine terms than girls; however, men were described in similarly masculine adjectives as women. Despite limitations of interpretability of the results, the study presents a possible approach of exploring past characterization of the two genders.

Source: Journal of Research in Personality - May 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research