Why does the gender or race of the author matter?

http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

This study indicates that job applicants with white sounding names are more likely to get call backs for interviews than applicants with black names, even if the resumes are identical in every other respect.

One flaw that's been pointed out in tests like this is that the white names are things like Richard, while the black names are things like Deshawn. Names like Deshawn are associated with uneducated poor black people, the equivalent of Cletus or Billy Bob for white people. So maybe the employers are partially discriminating against economic class. Variations of this kind of test have replicated similar results however, so it stands to reason that there is a significant racial bias in effect. This could easily extend to fiction publishing.

As for women. There's no good data. 78% of publishers and 62% of fiction readers are women. People generally prefer to read authors of their own gender, so it seems like they would have a boost if anything. The only examples of discrimination I could find are anecdotal accounts from frustrated individuals. That being said, there is definitely an imbalance in men's favor in certain genres, such as sci fi, fantasy and war. So I would take it that bias against female authors exists among genres that are perceived as having large male audiences.

/r/writing Thread Parent