What might books be teaching young children about gender?

Abstract

We investigated how gender is represented in children's books using a 200,000 word corpus comprising 249 popular, contemporary books for young children (0-5 years). Using human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified the gender biases of words within the corpus and within individual books. We find that children's books contain large numbers of words that adults judge as more masculine or feminine. Semantic analyses based on co-occurrence data yielded word clusters related to gender stereotypes (e.g., feminine: emotions; masculine: tools). Co-occurrence data also indicate that books instantiate gender stereotypes found in other research (e.g., girls are better at reading and boys at math). Finally, we used large-scale data to estimate the gender distribution of the audience for individual books, and find that children tend to be exposed to gender stereotypes for their own gender. Together the data suggest that children's books may be an early source of gender stereotypes.

Boys Write About Boys: Androcentrism in Children’s Reading Experience and Its Emergence in Children’s Own Writing

“…Once children are literate, exposure to written language grows further and school-age children rapidly acquire information from books (Hopkins & Weisberg, 2017;Young, Moss, & Cornwell, 2007). A well-documented feature of children's literature is that it contains gender stereotypes (e.g., Lewis, Borkenhagen, Converse, Lupyan, & Seidenberg, 2020). In this article, we extend these findings by investigating whether gender biases exist in the language children themselves write.…”

Sixty Years of Gender Representation in Children’s Books: Conditions Associated with Overrepresentation of Male versus Female Protagonists

“…In order to obtain a large, representative sample of widely read titles, we included books from a variety of sources: award winners, best sellers from top retailers at the time of collection (e.g., Amazon and Barnes & Noble), specific recommendations to parents or teachers, and publishing catalogs. We also added titles from the Wisconsin Children's Book Corpus (Lewis et al, 2020) that were not captured by our initial sampling methods but were accessible online after direct search.…”

“…In order to obtain a representative sample of the books available to children, we analyzed books accessible online for purchase or reading. Previous studies have typically focused on award-winning books or catalogs available in libraries and schools (Crabb & Marciano, 2011;Filipović, 2018;Hamilton et al, 2006;Lewis et al, 2020;McCabe et al, 2011), but a problem with this approach is that it may privilege older books, such that estimates of the number of male and female protagonists carry over from previous years.…”

“…However, other research suggests that stereotypes permeate children's books at multiple levels, including text (Clark et al, 2003;Lewis et al, 2020) and illustrations (Caldwell & Wilbraham, 2018;Crabb & Marciano, 2011). Even when female characters appear as protagonists, they are often portrayed as more emotional (Lewis et al, 2020;Tepper & Cassidy, 1999), less active (Turner-Bowker, 1996), and less associated with STEM (Axell & Boström, 2019;Caldwell & Wilbraham, 2018). Thus, it is not only necessary to strive for equitable representation in the numbers of male and female characters, but also for non-stereotypical depictions of these characters.…”

“…The differential frequency of male and female characters in media might be less consequential if the accompanying content counteracted the disproportionate numbers. However, studies examining the content of children's literature report stereotypical portrayals of male and female characters (Anderson & Hamilton, 2005;Lewis et al, 2020). For example, males are more likely to be the bread-winners across a broad range of professions and to be depicted outdoors and as adventurous.…”