Male authors are in general appreciated more than females, and Corina Koolen, working at the Huygens Institute, applies stylometry to make plausible that this greater appreciation is not based on obective elements of style or plot, but presumably rather on the prejudices of readers, critics and juries in literary prize competitions. I think that this is a new application of stylometry — even allowing for the work in author profiling, which concerns differences in style without attendingto the question of quality. Koolen also shows, for example, that genre influences the descriptions of men and women more than the gender of the author does.
There’s a sympathetic review (in Dutch) of her dissertation in the one
of the leading Dutch newspapers, the NRC:
The thesis itself is in English and is distributed by the University of Amsterdam:
John Nerbonne, Freiburg