On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 7:55 AM, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.frwrote:
I do not find such books on female sports. In fact, if I look for a book on the French women's soccer team on Amazon, I find something... extracted from Wikipedia! (Recall that football is the most popular sport in France...)
In short, for certain topics (e.g. male sports), there is a gazillion books, biographies, and other source material readily available, while for others (e.g. female sports) such sources are more difficult to find.
What I would like to understand is how much the bias is caused by such imbalances in sources. A possible evaluation method would be to consider female and male personalities (e.g. writers) equal in notoriety (e.g. according to scholars from that field), and to compare the length and quality of the biographies. What do you think?
A couple of confounding factors: (a) Historically many talented women writers have written as men (or using a house pseudonym).
(b) Historically serials have bee consumed disproportionately by women and books by men. Historically libraries index book content but not serial content by subject. Thus material written for a female audience has lower visibility, even to writers in the field, because it's so much harder to find.
cheers stuart