“Written by a Man” — a Compliment or an Insult?
A Stylometric Analysis of Female Character Complexity in Male- and Female-Authored Fiction.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/ths.2025.007Keywords
stylometry, male gaze, character complexity, natural language processing, corpus linguisticsAbstract
This study investigates whether male and female authors differ in the linguistic complexity they attribute to female characters in contemporary fiction. Drawing on a custom corpus compiled of fragments of dialogue spoken by female characters in one hundred fantasy novels published in the 2010s, the analysis applies stylometric methods to measure two forms of linguistic complexity: lexical complexity and syntactic complexity. Statistical modelling reveals no significant difference between male- and female-authored texts in terms of lexical complexity. However, syntactic complexity differs significantly, in favour of male-authored dialogue. These findings partially contradict expectations grounded in feminist theory, suggesting that women would have the tools and experiences to produce more complex female characters. This paper presents the first, to this date, stylometric analysis of gender effects on character complexity.
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