Gender associations in the twentieth-century English-language literature

The data required to study stereotypes held in the past are often not available. Using Google Books Ngram corpus, we explored the depiction of male and female characters in the twentieth-century English-language fiction. By analyzing adjective-noun bigrams, we examined adjectives used in association with “man”, “woman”, “boy”, and “girl”. Men were described in more positive terms than women. Girls were depicted in more positive terms than boys at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the tendency reversed in the middle of the century. Boys were described in more masculine terms than girls; however, men were described in similarly masculine adjectives as women. Despite limitations of interpretability of the results, the study presents a possible approach of exploring past stereotypes.