Plot twist: Men do read books with women protagonists
New findings from Cornell University challenge industry assumptions about men’s reading habits and could reshape how books with women protagonists are published, promoted, and adapted.
ITHACA, N.Y. – In the publishing industry, there’s a common belief that men won’t read novels about women, but new research out of Cornell University finds just the opposite.
In the first large-scale study of its kind, men were equally willing to continue reading a story that featured a woman as the main character as one with a man. Women, however, showed a slight preference for reading stories about other women.
“This supposed preference among men for reading about men as characters just isn’t true. That doesn’t exist,” said Matthew Wilkens, associate professor of information science and co-author of “Causal Effect of Character Gender on Readers’ Preferences.” “That is contrary to the limited existing literature and contrary to widespread industry assumptions.”
Studies have shown that novels by men featured more male characters compared to books written by women, said Federica Bologna, a doctoral student in information science and the study’s lead author. Some previous research has suggested that men strongly prefer men as protagonists, while women will read about any gender, said Wilkens. However, these studies were practically “anecdotes” and included just a few dozen individuals.
For the new study, the researchers recruited almost 3,000 participants – 1,492 women and 1,491 men – and asked them to read two short stories, one about a hike and another that took place at a coffee shop. Both stories’ main characters had gender-neutral names – Sam and Alex, respectively. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to read the hike story with he/him pronouns and the coffee shop story with she/her pronouns. For the other half, the pronouns were switched. After reading the two stories, participants were asked which one they wanted to keep reading.
About three-quarters of the men picked the hike story regardless of whether it featured a man or woman as the protagonist. Women, however, chose the hike story when Sam was a woman 77% of the time, but only 70% of the time when Sam was a man.
“Readers are pretty flexible,” Wilkens said. “Give them interesting stories, and they will want to read them.”
Bologna hopes this work will encourage the publishing industry to promote more books with a variety of girl and women characters.
In future work, the researchers hope to explore the preferences of nonbinary readers and to study whether the same assumptions about men’s preferences are causing creators to avoid female protagonists in other types of media, including video games.
For additional information, read this Cornell Chronicle story.
Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews.
Article Title
Causal Effect of Character Gender on Readers’ Preferences
Signs of Sir Terry Pratchett’s dementia may have been hidden in his books – new study
Signs of Sir Terry Pratchett’s dementia may have been present in his writing a decade before his official diagnosis, new research has found.
Cardiff University
Researchers examined the "lexical diversity" – a measure of how varied an author’s word choices are – of 33 books from Pratchett's Discworld series, focusing specifically on his use of nouns and adjectives.
The study found that Pratchett’s language in “The Lost Continent”, written almost 10 years before his diagnosis of Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA), a rare form of Alzheimer's, showed a significant decline in the complexity of the language used compared to his previous works.
Published in peer-reviewed journal Brain Sciences, the research team hope that the study may aid in the early detection of dementia, for which there is currently no cure.
Dr Thom Wilcockson, from Loughborough’s School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, explained: “Identifying dementia in the early stages is important as it may enable us to use interventions sooner before the brain is damaged beyond repair.
“Research indicates that memory problems may not be the first symptom of dementia. We wanted to explore whether language could be an early warning sign, and to do this, we used Sir Terry Pratchett’s books, who himself suffered dementia.
“Our analysis found that Sir Terry’s use of language did indeed change during his career. These results suggest that language may be one of the first signs of dementia, and Sir Terry’s books reveal a potential new approach for early diagnosis.”
Dr Melody Pattison, Lecturer in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, added: "We would normally expect less lexical diversity as texts get longer, but even after controlling for text length, our findings were still significant. The shifts in language were not something a reader would necessarily notice, but rather a subtle, progressive change.”
Sir Terry Pratchett spoke candidly about the disease and was vocal that more needed to be done to raise awareness. He sadly died in 2015, aged 66.
Journal
Brain Sciences
Method of Research
Content analysis
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Detecting Dementia Using Lexical Analysis: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Tells a More Personal Story
Article Publication Date
25-Jan-2026
