Gatekeeping in Creative Industries

Kim, Kwan Woo and Phillipa Chong. 2023. “Writing By Women or For Women? Either Way, You’re Less Likely to Be Reviewed.” Poetics 96:101737.

Using a population dataset of English-language fiction, we find that mainstream book review outlets penalize women authors by excluding women-typed genres such as romance and by devaluing women-authored literary fiction. Gender devaluation in the literary field operates at two levels: categorical exclusion between genres, and devaluation of women’s work within the literary genres that are most frequently reviewed.

Journal page

Dessauer, Julia and Kwan Woo Kim (equal authorship). “Short Order: Restructuring Hollywood’s Writers’ Rooms in the Age of Streaming.” Invited for the Poetics Special Issue on Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the Arts.

Pairing ninety interviews with population data on two decades of television shows, we show that the rise of streaming services led to the contraction of writers’ rooms, and that the remaining seats were disproportionately allocated to senior writers — narrowing the pipeline through which new writers build their careers. The paper illustrates how technological disruption can activate opportunity hoarding among incumbents, and foreshadows how new technological interruptions, including artificial intelligence, may raise the bar for entry into creative industries.