When More Women Rise Near to the Top: Gender Bias and Underrepresentation of Women Novelists

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 16. Stratification and Mobility

Abstract

This study aims to answer the question: if more women gain access to professional training and elite careers, will they crack “glass ceiling”? Using a case of the Korean literary field as a unique opportunity to observe changes over time, as women novelists’ increasingly entered the field and gained critical appraisals in Korean literature since 1980’s, I hypothesize that women novelists would still face significant disadvantages gaining a long-term reputation, even after more of them attained elite careers in the field. By employing a mixed method approach, I first analyze the net effect of gender on novelists’ odds of being canonized, especially comparing those who debuted before and after the 1980’s. Contrary to expectations that women would do better, or at least would not do worse, when they had more access to training and careers, the results suggest that women novelists are much less likely to reach the top when they debuted in the more recent era, compared to women novelists who debuted before women’s social status increased. Second, I examine how critical discourses contain gender bias that devalues women novelists, even after they are included in the literary canon. The results show that critics employ different cultural repertoire in the critical discourse on artists and their artworks depending on the novelist’s gender. Unlike men novelists, women novelists are more likely to be labeled by their gender and homogenized as members of a group rather than be appreciated as autonomous and creative artists who attain a high art quality. Building on previous literature in sociology of gender and culture, I suggest a conditional argument on exacerbating gender bias to women who are near the top. As competition in the field increases and more women compete for limited ‘women’s spots,’ “unfair tournaments” (Castagnetti and Rosti 2013) may lead to higher bias when evaluation process is unstructured and done without concrete criteria.

Author

• Jina Lee, The University of Arizona