Stories written by children are far more likely to feature male characters – regardless of whether the writer is a boy or a girl.
at the University of Oxford and her colleagues analysed more than 100,000 short stories written by British children, aged 5 to 13, for a .
The researchers wanted to find out how a child’s gender influenced the gender of the characters they wrote about. They also wanted to determine if this changed with the child’s age.
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The team used the England and Wales birth register from 2017 to categorise every character named in the children’s stories. A name was considered traditionally male if over 60 per cent of the babies given that name that year were recorded as male at birth, while a name was considered traditionally female if over 60 per cent of babies with the name were recorded as female at birth.
The researchers found that – regardless of age – boys typically wrote about male characters. More that 75 per cent of the characters in the stories written by boys were male.
In contrast, while about 70 per cent of the youngest girls wrote about female characters, only about 50 per cent of 13-year-old girls did so.
In other words, boys continue to write predominantly from the perspective of their own gender as they grow up whereas girls don’t.
The researchers suspected that this is because the books children read often have central male characters. So they used the same methods to analyse the gender of characters in the Oxford Children’s Corpus – a large sample of children’s literature from 1813 to the modern day.
The researchers found that male names were overrepresented in the sample. Just 38 per cent of characters in the books were female. This lack of balance was largely due to male writers writing more about male characters, says Hsaio.
Looking at the books published from 2005 onwards, which made up more than 69 per cent of the sample, the researchers found that male writers had actually increased the rate at which they wrote about male characters.
This bias in children’s literature might have a detrimental effect on boys’ outlook on life, says Hsiao. “If all boys read is about boys, they may not be motivated as much to think about the female perspective,” she says.
“I found these results surprising because I have seen unpublished data that both boys and girls enjoy stories with female protagonists so I would have predicted that both boys and girls would have become more balanced over time,” says at the University of Sussex, UK.
“There are no quick fixes to the issues raised in this work,” says at University College London. “It seems likely that children have learned, from the books that they read or from society more generally, that the actions of boys and men are more likely to be sufficiently exciting and interesting to be worth writing about.”
“I’d encourage parents to make sure that their children – both boys and girls – have access to books that feature strong female characters,” says Rodd. She also says publishers need to better reflect on the gender balance of the work that they publish.
Society for Research in Child Development
