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Abstract：
Works of fiction play a crucial role in the production of cultural stereotypes. Concerning gender, a widely held presumption is that many such works ascribe agency to men and passivity to women. However, large-scale diachronic analyses of this notion have been lacking. This paper provides an assessment of agency attributions in 87,531 fiction works written between 1850 and 2010. It introduces a syntax-based approach for extracting networks of character interactions. Agency is then formalized as a dyadic property: Does a character primarily serve as an agent acting upon the other character or as recipient acted upon by the other character? Findings indicate that female characters are more likely to be passive in cross-gender relationships than their male counterparts. This difference, the gender agency gap, has declined since the 19th century but persists into the 21st. Male authors are especially likely to attribute less agency to female characters. Moreover, certain kinds of actions, especially physical and villainous ones, have more pronounced gender disparities.
摘要：
小说作品在文化刻板印象的产生中起着至关重要的作用。关于性别，一个普遍持有的假设是，许多这样的作品将代理归因于男性，而被动归因于女性。然而,缺乏对这一概念的大规模历时分析。本文对1850年至2010年之间创作的87,531部小说作品中的代理归因进行了评估。它介绍了一种基于语法的方法来提取字符交互网络。然后，代理被形式化为二元属性：角色主要是作为代理作用于另一个角色还是作为另一个角色作用的接收者？研究结果表明，女性角色在跨性别关系中比男性角色更有可能被动。这种差异,性别机构的差距，自19世纪以来一直在下降，但一直持续到21世纪。男性作者尤其可能将较少的代理归因于女性角色。此外，某些类型的动作，尤其是身体和邪恶的，有更明显的性别差异。
