Scholars have consistently found that female artists receive less attention from critics than their male counterparts. In this study, we conduct a closer examination of the mechanisms driving this persistent form of inequality. Drawing on a uniquely comprehensive dataset of all English-language fiction books published in a calendar year, we find that women authors face two significant—and distinctive—gender penalties. First, we find that books classified as belonging to feminized literary subgenres are least likely to be reviewed by mainstream critical outlets. This gendered genre-based exclusion is the first way in which women authors are penalized, since the majority of writers writing in these categories are women. Second, we find that even when women writers publish books in androcentric subgenres or gender-neutral categories of literary fiction, their books are still less likely to be selected for review compared to those written by their male counterparts. This is a form of gendered artist-based exclusion. These empirical findings exhort scholars of the arts to move beyond documenting gender inequalities in review coverage to uncovering the multiple ways that gender impresses itself on the review process as an attribute of both artists and genres.

学者们一直发现，女性艺术家比男性艺术家受到评论家的关注更少。在这项研究中，我们对驱动这种持续形式的不平等的机制进行了更仔细的研究。利用一个日历年内出版的所有英语小说书籍的独特综合数据集，我们发现女性作家面临两种重大且独特的性别惩罚。首先，我们发现被归类为女性化文学子流派的书籍最不可能被主流批评媒体评论。这种基于性别的流派排除是女性作家受到惩罚的第一种方式，因为在这些类别中写作的大多数作家都是女性。其次，我们发现，即使女性作家出版男性中心的子类型或中性文学小说类别的书籍，与男性同行相比，她们的书籍仍然不太可能被选中进行审查。这是一种基于性别的艺术家排斥形式。这些实证研究结果告诫艺术学者不要仅仅记录评论报道中的性别不平等，而是要揭示性别在评论过程中作为艺术家和流派的属性而给自己留下深刻印象的多种方式。