What Women Actually Want: Professions, Prestige, and Desire in Bestselling Fiction

I analyze how occupations are portrayed in contemporary popular fiction by coding the protagonists' and love interests' professions in 1181 bestselling novels from 2023--2024. Using large language model–assisted extraction with human oversight, I map which roles dominate across genres and compare them to real-world occupational data. The results show that fiction highlights a narrow set of archetypes---e.g., students, writers, detectives, athletes---while downplaying most everyday forms of labor. Overrepresentation is shaped partly by prestige: higher-status jobs are somewhat more likely to be emphasized, but many exceptions remain, with some prestigious professions underrepresented (e.g., tech executives and engineers) while low-prestige but narratively useful roles (e.g., hunters, antique dealers) are prominent. In romance titles, occupational portrayals diverge sharply by gender: men are written into positions of power, danger, or transgression, while women are more often portrayed in expressive or domestic roles. Comparing these fictional portrayals to survey and dating-app data on occupational desirability reveals consistent gaps, underscoring how cultural products use work as symbolic resources for storytelling and signaling desirability rather than mirroring labor markets.