Queens College, CUNY, Department of Sociology, Queens, New York, United States of America.
Queens College, CUNY, Department of Mathematics, Queens, New York, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Apr 9;13(4):e0195298. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195298. eCollection 2018.
In traditional publishing, female authors' titles command nearly half (45%) the price of male authors' and are underrepresented in more prestigious genres, and books are published by publishing houses, which determined whose books get published, subject classification, and retail price. In the last decade, the growth of digital technologies and sales platforms have enabled unprecedented numbers of authors to bypass publishers to publish and sell books. The rise of indie publishing (aka self-publishing) reflects the growth of the "gig" economy, where the influence of firms has diminished and workers are exposed more directly to external markets. Encompassing the traditional and the gig economy, the book industry illuminates how the gig economy may disrupt, replicate, or transform the gender discrimination mechanisms and inequality found in the traditional economy. In a natural experiment spanning from 2002 to 2012 and including over two million book titles, we compare discrimination mechanisms and inequality in indie and traditional publishing. We find that indie publishing, though more egalitarian, largely replicates traditional publishing's gender discrimination patterns, showing an unequal distribution of male and female authors by genre (allocative discrimination), devaluation of genres written predominantly by female authors (valuative discrimination), and lower prices within genres for books by female authors (within-job discrimination). However, these discrimination mechanisms are associated with far less price inequality in indie, only 7%, in large part due to the smaller and lower range of prices in indie publishing compared to traditional publishing. We conclude that, with greater freedom, workers in the gig economy may be inclined to greater equality but will largely replicate existing labor market segmentation and the lower valuation of female-typical work and of female workers. Nonetheless, price setting for work may be more similar for workers in the gig economy due to market competition that will compress prices ranges.
在传统出版领域，女性作者的作品标题价格仅为男性作者的近一半（45%），而且在更有声望的体裁中代表性不足，书籍由出版社出版，出版社决定出版谁的书、分类和零售价格。在过去十年中，数字技术和销售平台的发展使数量空前的作者能够绕过出版商出版和销售书籍。独立出版（又名自助出版）的兴起反映了“零工”经济的增长，在这种经济中，公司的影响力减弱，工人更直接地暴露在外部市场中。包括传统和零工经济在内，图书行业阐明了零工经济如何破坏、复制或改变传统经济中的性别歧视机制和不平等现象。在一个从 2002 年到 2012 年跨越的自然实验中，包括超过两百万个书名，我们比较了独立出版和传统出版中的歧视机制和不平等。我们发现，尽管独立出版更加平等，但它在很大程度上复制了传统出版的性别歧视模式，表现为按体裁（配置歧视）分配男女作者的不平等分布、贬低主要由女性作者撰写的体裁（评价歧视）以及女性作者在同一体裁内书籍的价格较低（职业内歧视）。然而，与传统出版相比，独立出版中的这些歧视机制与价格不平等的关联度要低得多，仅为 7%，这主要是由于独立出版的价格范围较小且较低。我们的结论是，在更大的自由下，零工经济中的工人可能更倾向于平等，但他们在很大程度上会复制现有的劳动力市场分割以及对女性典型工作和女性工人的低估值。尽管如此，由于市场竞争将压缩价格范围，零工经济中的工人的工作定价可能会更加相似。
