Structuring Cultural Inequality: Author Gender and Gendered Content in Literary Prizes

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Cultural Production and Circulation

Abstract

While gender equality appears to have progressed in economic and political spaces, culture has been pointed to as perpetuating gender inequality. However, our understandings of cultural delays in gender equality have been underexplored, in part due to different definitions and operationalizations of culture. Public culture makes uncovering structural cultural inequality possible in one field over time. Using cultural awards as a highly structured pathway of cultural consecration, this paper draws on and develops arguments concerning awards as gendered organizations and as political processes, involving tokenism and symbolic annihilation. Using originally collected data from 1917 to 2024 for 12 prestigious literary awards, I assess the odds of a book winning an award based on the author gender, gendered content, and author-content pairs. Furthermore, I test if these odds are different during periods of sociopolitical unrest focused on women’s rights. I find that, although author gender and gendered content do not seem to impact the odds of winning an award, these results differ among specific awards and, importantly, by whether or not the award was given during a period of increased feminist activity: while men and masculine content are prized outside these periods over women and feminine content, during periods of increased attention to women’s rights, including first- and second-wave feminism and the Women’s March era, women’s odds of winning draws even to men’s, erasing the benefit men receive outside these periods. However, some awards moved from gender-neutral odds of winning to preferring men’s books and masculine books during periods of feminist activity, suggesting that there is a backlash against the increased attention to women’s equality. These findings resituate understandings of gender inequality, elucidating how inequality is structured by cultural processes that are perceived as gender-neutral, particularly during periods where there is increased attention to issues of social equality.

Author

• Margaret M Palmer, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill