Reviewer Preferences and Gender Disparities in Aesthetic Judgments

06/17/2022

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by   Ida Marie Schytt Lassen, et al.

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Aesthetic preferences are considered highly subjective resulting in inherently noisy judgements of aesthetic objects, yet certain aspects of aesthetic judgement display convergent trends over time. This paper present a study that uses literary reviews as a proxy for aesthetic judgement in order to identify systematic components that can be attributed to bias. Specifically we find that judgement of literary quality in newspapers displays a gender bias in preference of male writers. Male reviewers have a same gender preference while female reviewer show an opposite gender preference. While alternative accounts exist of this apparent gender disparity, we argue that it reflects a cultural gender antagonism.