@inproceedings{luo-etal-2024-reflecting,
    title = "Reflecting the Male Gaze: Quantifying Female Objectification in 19th and 20th Century Novels",
    author = "Luo, Kexin  and
      Mao, Yue  and
      Zhang, Bei  and
      Hao, Sophie",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1205",
    pages = "13803--13812",
    abstract = "Inspired by the concept of the male gaze (Mulvey, 1975) in literature and media studies, this paper proposes a framework for analyzing gender bias in terms of female objectification{---}the extent to which a text portrays female individuals as objects of visual pleasure. Our framework measures female objectification along two axes. First, we compute an agency bias score that indicates whether male entities are more likely to appear in the text as grammatical agents than female entities. Next, by analyzing the word embedding space induced by a text (Caliskan et al., 2017), we compute an appearance bias score that indicates whether female entities are more closely associated with appearance-related words than male entities. Applying our framework to 19th and 20th century novels reveals evidence of female objectification in literature: we find that novels written from a male perspective systematically objectify female characters, while novels written from a female perspective do not exhibit statistically significant objectification of any gender.",
}

Inspired by the concept of the male gaze (Mulvey, 1975) in literature and media studies, this paper proposes a framework for analyzing gender bias in terms of female objectification{---}the extent to which a text portrays female individuals as objects of visual pleasure. Our framework measures female objectification along two axes. First, we compute an agency bias score that indicates whether male entities are more likely to appear in the text as grammatical agents than female entities. Next, by analyzing the word embedding space induced by a text (Caliskan et al., 2017), we compute an appearance bias score that indicates whether female entities are more closely associated with appearance-related words than male entities. Applying our framework to 19th and 20th century novels reveals evidence of female objectification in literature: we find that novels written from a male perspective systematically objectify female characters, while novels written from a female perspective do not exhibit statistically significant objectification of any gender.
Luo, Kexin Mao, Yue Zhang, Bei Hao, Sophie
Reflecting the Male Gaze: Quantifying Female Objectification in 19th and 20th Century Novels