Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208.
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne 50678, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Jul 16;121(29):e2319514121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2319514121. Epub 2024 Jul 8.
Works of fiction play a crucial role in the production of cultural stereotypes. Concerning gender, a widely held presumption is that many such works ascribe agency to men and passivity to women. However, large-scale diachronic analyses of this notion have been lacking. This paper provides an assessment of agency attributions in 87,531 fiction works written between 1850 and 2010. It introduces a syntax-based approach for extracting networks of character interactions. Agency is then formalized as a dyadic property: Does a character primarily serve as an agent acting upon the other character or as recipient acted upon by the other character? Findings indicate that female characters are more likely to be passive in cross-gender relationships than their male counterparts. This difference, the gender agency gap, has declined since the 19th century but persists into the 21st. Male authors are especially likely to attribute less agency to female characters. Moreover, certain kinds of actions, especially physical and villainous ones, have more pronounced gender disparities.
虚构作品在文化刻板印象的形成中起着至关重要的作用。就性别而言，人们普遍认为，许多这样的作品将能动性赋予男性，将被动性赋予女性。然而，对于这种观念的大规模历时分析一直缺乏。本文对 1850 年至 2010 年间创作的 87531 部虚构作品中的能动性归因进行了评估。它引入了一种基于语法的方法来提取角色交互的网络。能动性随后被形式化为二元属性：一个角色主要是作为作用于另一个角色的主体行事，还是作为被另一个角色作用的受体行事？研究结果表明，女性角色在跨性别关系中比男性角色更有可能处于被动地位。自 19 世纪以来，这种差异（性别能动性差距）一直在缩小，但仍持续到 21 世纪。男性作家尤其可能赋予女性角色较少的能动性。此外，某些类型的动作，尤其是身体动作和反派动作，性别差异更为明显。
