Gender Stereotyping and Under-representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A Twenty-first Century Update

Hamilton, Mykol C.; Anderson, David A.; Broaddus, Michelle; Young, Kate

doi:10.1007/s11199-006-9128-6

Cited by 201 publications

(190 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Past and more recent examinations of print media aimed at children reveal both unequal gender representation and common gender stereotypes. In their study of 200 topselling popular children's books, Hamilton et al (2006) looked at gender representation in pictures, characters, characters' behavior and personality as well as setting and they found out that female characters were under-represented in children's picture books. Another research conducted by Fitzpatrick and McPherson (2010) yielded similar results.…”

Section: B Gender Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender Representation in Children's EFL Textbooks

Parham¹

2013

TPLS

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Abstract-The differences in the speech and behavior of adult males and females may be a consequence of their sexist education in childhood; experimental research suggests that the development of children's gender identity is strongly affected by their reading materials and extensive research on these materials have revealed that gender bias and gender stereotypes are prevalent. The present study examines the representation of gender in conversations, illustrations and graphic design of the cover in nine packages designed to teach English to young children for evidence of bias. From each series, the intermediate level is analyzed. The results revealed that females have equitable visibility in conversations with regard to the number of participants, number of turns and the length of turns. Females however appeared to be the initiator of conversations 30 per cent more times than males. The analysis of illustrations in the second part confirmed the results of previous studies that females were under-represented in children's books. There were no significant differences in the representation of gender in the graphic design of the covers.

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Section: B Gender Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender Representation in Children's EFL Textbooks

Parham¹

2013

TPLS

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“…In his study on woman characters in pictured child books, Vannicopulou (2004) found that mother has the fundamental responsibility for raising children and acts like a service maid in the house and women are seen indoor or in places where they assume role of mother and housewife alike. Like these findings, Hamilton et al (2006) in their studies argued that female characters deal with child education more than male ones and they are seen more indoor scenes rather than outside. Besides, they found that women contributed less to professional life compared to men and in the pictured books for both children and adults discrimination persisted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 76%

“Mother” in Aytül Akal’s Stories within the Context of Social Gender Perception

Yılmaz

Yakar

2016

IJHE

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Just as many factors are of question in one's identity, so is the way to present the characters in literary books. Presentation of characters on equality basis is very important so that democratic culture and human rights related values are acquired. In this study, mother image fictionalized by Aytul Akal in her stories of children is dealt with in terms of social gender. The study was conducted through document analysis design. We have reached and examined all of the story books written by Aytul Akal for children. Nine of these books were written by Aytul Akal herself while only two in cooperation with Mavisel Yener. The data were collected based on studies on social gender and researches on quality of children's books during literature review then the data collected were classified for archival reasons while they were classified for purpose of record. Secondly, story books written by Aytul Akal for children were examined and the image of father and mother were encoded and recorded by two researchers and one qualitative research specialist. The data analyzed descriptively were exposed to content analysis for detailed information. As a result, it was found that the character attributes on image of mother in Aytul Akal's works were closely related with her roles in home and work life. Since mother was as someone dealing with home work, children and work, from time to time she experienced difficulties. This shows that traditional image or understanding of mother in the stories did not essentially change and the workload of mother was stable while her work outside home increased. The present study aims to assess the mother image in Aytul Akal's stories based on the social gender perspective.

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“…Some researchers (e.g., Dickinson et al, 2012;Sé né chal et al, 1996;Waxman et al, 2014) have looked into the pedagogic values of storybooks with respect to children's cognitive and linguistic development. Others (e.g., Crabb & Marciano, 2011;Hamilton et al, 2006;Stephens, 1992), however, have taken a critical lens and have examined the ideologies which storybooks embody. By nature, the present study will be one of the latter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Critical Discourse Study of a German Children’s Book Series: Representation of Social Actors and Construction of Legitimation

Leung¹

2016

IJL

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Among practitioners of critical discourse studies (CDS), German storybooks for children are relatively unexplored in comparison with storybooks targeted at the Anglophone communities. In this study, I investigated a German children's book series called Siggi Blitz. Containing a total of 23 639 words, this series comprises twelve storybooks which were released between 2013 and 2014. Focus was given to the discursive representation of characters and the legitimation strategies used to convey ideologies. Specifically, I would like to explore how female and male characters are represented. To this end, two analytic frameworks from van Leeuwen (1996Leeuwen ( , 2007Leeuwen ( , 2008-the Social Actor Theory and the discursive construction of legitimation-were employed. The findings indicate that gender stereotyping is pervasive in the storybooks. For instance, on the dimension of "categorization," female characters tend to be represented by reference to their physical appearance (viz., "physical identification") while male characters are regularly associated with their occupations (viz., "functionalization"). Analysis of the legitimation strategies used demonstrates that "rationalization" is the most frequent form of legitimation. "Rationalization" has two functions in the storybooks: (i) to justify acceptable and/or unacceptable behaviors; (ii) to mark the utility of common artifacts. Furthermore, it was found that "role model authority" is exclusively applied to male characters, echoing the findings regarding gender stereotyping in the earlier part of the study. Given the "socializing" nature of storybooks for children, the present study reveals that awareness in relation to the representation of gender has to be increased among story contributors.

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Gender Stereotyping and Under-representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A Twenty-first Century Update

Cited by 201 publications

References 22 publications

Gender Representation in Children's EFL Textbooks

Gender Representation in Children's EFL Textbooks

“Mother” in Aytül Akal’s Stories within the Context of Social Gender Perception

A Critical Discourse Study of a German Children’s Book Series: Representation of Social Actors and Construction of Legitimation

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