Reflecting the Male Gaze: Quantifying Female Objectification in 19th and
  20th Century Novels
Kexin Luo Yue Mao Bei Zhang Sophie Hao
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.