Systematic Gender Asymmetries in Aesthetic Judgments: An Observational Study of Book Reviewer Preferences

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