What Might Books Be Teaching Young Children About Gender?

Abstract

We investigated how gender is represented in children’s books using a novel 200,000-word corpus comprising 247 popular, contemporary books for young children. Using adult human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified gender biases of words in individual books and in the whole corpus. We found that children’s books contain many words that adults judge as gendered. Semantic analyses based on co-occurrence data yielded word clusters related to gender stereotypes (e.g., feminine: emotions; masculine: tools). Co-occurrence data also indicated that many books instantiate gender stereotypes identified in other research (e.g., girls are better at reading, and boys are better at math). Finally, we used large-scale data to estimate the gender distribution of the audience for individual books, and we found that children are more often exposed to stereotypes for their own gender. Together, the data suggest that children’s books may be an early source of gender associations and stereotypes.

Semantic Prosody: How Neutral Words With Collocational Positivity/Negativity Color Evaluative Judgments

“…For instance, one Twitter sentiment lexicon determines word valence by calculating the number of times a word appears in tweets with positive or negative emoticons, and “cause” appears far more often alongside negative emoticons (Kiritchenko et al, 2014). Such tools have also uncovered other collocations in language that may foster the development of implicit associations (for examples, see Caliskan et al, 2017; Charlesworth et al, 2021; Lewis et al, 2020; Lewis & Lupyan, 2020). Combinations of rating and collocation approaches to lexica development could provide more accurate measures of word meaning.…”

Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep

“…Text that contains more male than female doctors and more female than male nurses would establish collocations that may foster implicit bias. Indeed, corpora of children’s books and child-directed speech tend to have analogous gender-biases in collocations ( Charlesworth et al, 2021 ; Lewis et al, 2022 ). This suggests that one potential avenue for correcting implicit bias is to make efforts for equal representation of underrepresented groups with counter-stereotypical attributes in text.…”

“…African-American names collocate more with negative words than European-American names; female-related terms collocate more with family related words than male-related terms; and female-related terms collocate less with science- and math-related words than male-related terms ( Caliskan et al, 2017 ; Lewis and Lupyan, 2020 ). Many of these same biases also appear in child-directed text, such as children’s books, television shows, child-directed speech ( Charlesworth et al, 2021 ; Lewis et al, 2022 ).…”

Meanings within meanings: skilled readers activate irrelevant meanings of radicals in Chinese

“…Indeed, these examples call into question the very categorization employed in this study: it is assumed that the radical 女 "female" should be considered irrelevant or incongruous in the host of words in Chinese that employ it (奴 "slave," 奸 "wicked," 妒 "envy," 妖 "seductive, evil,"). 3 One must at least allow for the possibility that the prominence of the radical indicating femininity in so many lexical items of this class performs a consistent function in assigning negative characteristics to the female gender (Lewis & Lupyan, 2020;Lewis et al, 2021). One could explore this same concept further through analysis of characters used to write names for historically non-Chinese peoples which exhibit a tendency to employ incongruent radicals with animalistic associations (Ford, 2020).…”