Gender homophily in online book networks

Abstract

We measure the gender homophily (and other network statistics) on large-scale online book markets: amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, using datasets describing millions of books sold to readers. Large book networks are created by sales (two books are connected if many readers have bought both books) and can recommend new books to buy. The networks are analysed by the gender of their first author: is book consumption assortative by gender?Book networks are indeed gender-assortative: readers globally prefer to read from one author gender (the global assortativity coefficients by gender is around 0.4). Although 33% of first authors among all books are female, female books are not proportionally sold together with male books: an average of 20% (and median of 11%) of books co-bought with male books are female books. Instead, female books make up on average more than half of the books co-bought with other female books.The gender makeup of literary genres and structural book communities show that the gender homophily originates in a gender skew not only in certain literary genres (a fact known from prior studies), but even more strongly in certain book communities, with these book communities spanning multiple literary genres.