Filtering on Author Gender or Sex
About Author Gender or Sex
The values for author genders are not cataloged by HRAF, instead the data is gathered from national libraries around the world. HRAF acknowledges the diversity of human gender expression, but currently all of the authors have a recorded gender of either male or female, or the author’s gender is unknown. Once we have an author outside the gender binary, those values will be included in the filter.
For more details about the source of author data, please see the author profile page in this guide.
Because of the author data we have imported from national libraries around the world, it is possible to filter results when searching documents or paragraphs in eHRAF. Please keep the following in mind:
A document can have multiple authors
All authors in eHRAF have a gender or sex value of male, female, or unknown. Institutions, which do not have a gender, have a gender value of unknown.
Below are the filter options:
- Female only
results are only written by one or more female authors, with all other genders (including unknown) excluded
- Male only
results are only written by one or more male authors, with all other genders (including unknown) excluded
- Multiple genders (Excludes not specified)
results are written by multiple authors of different genders. Does not include authors whose gender is unknown.
- Multiple genders (Includes not specified)
results are written by multiple authors of different genders. Includes authors whose gender is unknown, so, for example, a result by a male author and an author with an unknown gender could appear.
- Not specified
results are only written by authors whose gender is unknown.
Authors with multiple genders from different sources
Because author gender or sex values come from multiple external sources, occasionally these sources will disagree about an author’s gender. Most often, this means that some sources will state a defined gender or sex, namely Male or Female, and another source will say Unknown. This is likely because one source did not spend time researching an author. In these cases, the filter will ignore the “Unknown” value and simply use the defined gender or sex value (male or female).