Tales and Tropes: Gender Roles from Word Embeddings in a Century of Children’s Books

Adukia, Anjali; Chiril, Patricia; Christ, Callista; Das, Anjali; Eble, Alex; Harrison, Emileigh; Runesha, Hakizumwami Birali

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4221213

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Understanding patterns in the manner in which characters are represented is also important, and we are pursuing this work in separate projects (c.f.Adukia et al (2022a),Adukia et al (2022b).18 We define putative race to be the race that society assigns to a person.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children's Books

Adukia¹,

Eble²,

Harrison³

et al. 2021

SSRN Journal

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children's Books

Adukia¹,

Eble²,

Harrison³

et al. 2021

SSRN Journal

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“…Analyzing gender representation in literature is crucial as it plays a significant role in shaping societal perceptions and reinforcing gender stereotypes [Adukia et al 2022b;Hoyle et al 2019]. While previous studies have examined gender dynamics in various domains, such as films [Khadilkar et al 2022], video games [Kohler et al 2021], and scientific communities [Cordeiro et al 2020;Pizzol et al 2022], literature remains relatively unexplored in this context.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender Representation in Literature: Analysis of Characters' Physical Descriptions

Silva,

Melo-Gomes,

Moro

2023

Anais Do XI Symposium on Knowledge Discovery, Mining and Learning (KDMiLe 2023)

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This study employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to quantitatively analyze the descriptions of male and female body parts in Portuguese literature. We investigate these descriptions' frequency, specificity, and objectification by examining a corpus of literary works. The results indicate distinct differences in how male and female bodies are portrayed, revealing evidence of gender bias in the choice of specific descriptors for body parts. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse surrounding gender representation in literature, shedding light on the potential biases in textual descriptions. Furthermore, it underscores the significance of NLP techniques in uncovering patterns within literary texts, providing valuable insights into data mining. Through this analysis, we deepen our understanding of gender dynamics within literary works and foster critical discussions on representation in literature.

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What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books

Adukia¹,

Eble²,

Harrison³

et al. 2021

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Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data and apply them, along with text analysis methods, to measure the representation of skin color, race, gender, and age in award winning children's books widely read in homes, classrooms, and libraries over the last century. We find that more characters with darker skin color appear over time, but the most influential books persistently depict characters with lighter skin color, on average, than other books, even after conditioning on race; we also find that children are depicted with lighter skin than adults on average. Relative to their growing share of the U.S. population, Black and Latinx people are underrepresented in these same books, while White males are overrepresented. Over time, females are increasingly present but appear less often in text than in images, suggesting greater symbolic inclusion in pictures than substantive inclusion in stories. We then present analysis of the supply of, and demand for, books with different levels of representation to better understand the economic behavior that may contribute to these patterns. On the demand side, we show that people consume books that center their own identities. On the supply side, we document higher prices for books that center nondominant social identities and fewer copies of these books in libraries that serve predominantly White communities. Lastly, we show that the types of children's books purchased in a neighborhood are related to local political beliefs.

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Tales and Tropes: Gender Roles from Word Embeddings in a Century of Children’s Books

Cited by 3 publications

References 35 publications

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children's Books

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children's Books

Gender Representation in Literature: Analysis of Characters' Physical Descriptions

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books

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