Gender and reading

In the present research, we examined the effect of protagonist gender on reader evaluations of excerpts from novels. Extant analyses of the role of gender in reading suggest that there should be a gender-match effect in which, for example, women prefer stories with female protagonists. To test this prediction, we created different versions of the excerpts in which a male protagonist was changed to a female protagonist and vice versa. Readers rated the texts on four evaluation items spanning both personal and intersubjective reactions to both the discourse and the story world. Two samples of readers were used: one in Canada and one in Germany. The results indicated that both men and women rated texts higher on the story-world items when they had a male protagonist, inconsistent with the gender-match prediction. There was no difference in this pattern between Canadian and German readers, suggesting that it is common across these cultures. We provide an alternative account based on the fundamental attribution error.