Reflecting the Male Gaze: Quantifying Female Objectification in 19th and 20th Century Novels

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework to quantify female objectification in literature by measuring agency bias and appearance bias, revealing systematic objectification in male perspective novels across 19th and 20th centuries.

Contribution

It develops a novel quantitative framework combining grammatical and semantic analysis to measure gender bias in literary texts, applied to historical novels.

Findings

Male perspective novels show significant female objectification.

Female perspective novels do not exhibit significant objectification.

The framework effectively quantifies gender bias in literature.

Abstract

Inspired by the concept of the male gaze (Mulvey, 1975) in literature and media studies, this paper proposes a framework for analyzing gender bias in terms of female objectification: the extent to which a text portrays female individuals as objects of visual pleasure. Our framework measures female objectification along two axes. First, we compute an agency bias score that indicates whether male entities are more likely to appear in the text as grammatical agents than female entities. Next, by analyzing the word embedding space induced by a text (Caliskan et al., 2017), we compute an appearance bias score that indicates whether female entities are more closely associated with appearance-related words than male entities. Applying our framework to 19th and 20th century novels reveals evidence of female objectification in literature: we find that novels written from a male perspective systematically objectify female characters, while novels written from a female perspective do not exhibit statistically significant objectification of any gender.