Despite a century’s worth of women’s rights movements since then, male (and sometimes female) writers still talk about female authors through the lens of “The Lady Writer.” We examined a collection of 10,287 reviews from the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times published since 2000. We labeled the genders of the reviewer and the author under review and then ran tests to identify language in the reviews that was indicative of the different genders. The tests return a series of “most distinctive words”: these are the individual words that distinguish one group from the other. In our case, this
means the words that differentiate book reviews of male authors versus female ones.
