An IBM team identified deep gender bias from 50 years of Booker Prize shortlists

#TIA – This comes under the “who cares?” category — why there’s gender bias on the Booker Prize shortlist.

“Some of the world’s most celebrated literary works are filled with gender bias.

Stereotypes were rife among both male and female characters in the descriptors used to identify them, their jobs, and even their roles in the books, according to a study by IBM’s India Research Lab which looked at works shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize between 1969 and 2017. Male characters figured more prominently in plots, and were depicted as powerful, wealthy and strong, it showed, while female characters were more likely to be depicted as beautiful or romantic instead.

The researchers used artificial intelligence to look for instances of such bias in some 275 works shortlisted for the 50-year-old annual literary award given to works of fiction written in English and published in the UK. The study used plot descriptions from book recommendations website Goodreads.”

Read more at Quartz