Women write nearly as many books as men

The study of the gender distribution of authors of Polish and German books for the years 1800-2021, as well as keywords in the titles, was conducted by researchers from the Institute of Information and Media Sciences of the University of Wrocław and the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology.

According to Dr. Adam Pawłowski, head of the Laboratory of Digital Humanities at the University of Wrocław, in Central Europe, where national borders and currency systems changed very often, book authorship is one of the best and most stable measures of equality in the long term - e.g. 200 years.

'The current situation and the scale of changes can only be revealed only by analysing large data sets over a long period of time. Big data are insensitive to spectacular indicators of women's status, such as prominent positions in politics or awards', the scientists explain in the monograph being prepared for publication.

So far, in the study of social processes related to equality, economic and legal tools have been most often used, such as income, purchasing power or granted rights analysis.

'Good intentions are not enough to write a textbook, scientific monograph, guidebook or literary work (volume of poetry, novel). You need education, funds, an appropriate intellectual level and a lot of reading. Such deed includes all the variables of education, economic and social status, but for traditional economics or historical sociology it may be elusive for objective reasons (this is exactly the situation in Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries). In addition, in order to publish a book, social acceptance of the author is necessary, including their gender and origin', says Dr. Pawłowski.

He gives the example of medicine, science and natural sciences, which were almost completely masculinised in the 19th century. As a result, as authors of works in, for example, surgery or physics, women would simply not be recognised and no publisher would publish their works because they would not find enough buyers.

'The change that has taken place in this respect in the last hundred years is enormous. The sex ratio in both Poland and Germany is now around 43% (women) and 57% (men), while in the beginning of the 19th century, books written by women accounted for only about 5 percent. of the entire publishing production', the researcher says and emphasises that despite the significant differences between the domains of German and Polish culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, the gender participation curves are very similar.

However, the subjects of books written by men and women, represented by keywords automatically generated from titles, are different. The researchers emphasize that it was a surprise to them: 'We couldn't believe it. Therefore, we divided both title databases into different time tranches, so as not to process contemporary data together with earlier ones. The result remained the same: men improved the world by dealing with engineering, politics, economics, science and religion, while women, as authors, devoted their time to other matters, i.e. family, children, education and generally emotional sphere. Big data analysis shows that there are no significant differences between Poland and Germany in this respect, and there is also a continuity of topics from the 19th century to the present day', the scientists say.

How to interpret this quantitative change and the uneven distribution of interests? 'According to some, the topics taken up by women and men express traditional social roles imposed by the environment. Others say that they are an emanation of today's unrestrained interests and preferences. Both I and co-author Dr. Tomasz Walkowiak are in favour of the latter interpretation. Women choose the topics of their publications on their own, and the cultural environment does not limit this in any way, as it did in the 19th century', says Dr. Pawłowski.

The researchers from Wrocław also ised Polish data to check the gender distribution of authors in groups of writing genres (novel, guide, etc.). What emerges from it is the overwhelming dominance of men in most genres, and the dominance of women in several domains that have traditionally been considered feminised. Women are therefore much more likely than men to write texts classified as 'romance', 'cookbooks' and 'children's books'. Slightly more often than men, women are the authors of 'alphabet books' and publications indexed as 'bibliographies'. A distribution close to balanced can be seen in the case of texts catalogued as 'prose', 'guide' and 'science'. In the remaining genres, the dominance of male authors increases, reaching the extreme level for 'speeches' (political, philosophical) - in this category, women are the authors of less than 3 percent of the texts.

'Without commenting, we also draw attention to the fact that among publications indexed as +humour'+ the share of women authors is approximately 5%, and in the categories of +comedy+ and +satire+ - approx. 7%.', the scientists add.

In their opinion, large bibliographies processed by the methods of digital humanities provide insight into the actual, not expected or declared, gender status. It is largely independent of official policies and spectacular events publicised by the media.

'The undeniable increase in the share of women writing and publishing books confirms the growing level of actual equality, understood as a fair participation of representatives of both sexes in the intellectual and cultural life of the national or communication community, but authors of both sexes realize their ambitions in their own territories, unchanged for decades', concludes Dr. Pawłowski.

The entire research results will be presented in the monograph 'From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg. Introduction to digital humanities', to be published by Universitas at the end of 2023. Data processing was carried out thanks to the CLARIN-PL infrastructure.

Additional information - in the source publication.

PAP - Science in Poland, Karolina Duszczyk

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tr. RL