“Gender Bias Still Exists in Modern Children’s Literature, Say Centre Researchers”

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You know that expression, “Not from the Onion”? How did we say that, all those years before the Onion existed?

I was thinking about this after encountering (amidst a Google search for something else) this article on a website called “College News”:

DANVILLE, KY., March 8, 2007–Two Centre College professors spent the past six years reading and analyzing 200 children’s books to discover a disturbing trend: gender bias still exists in much of modern children’s literature.

Dr. David Anderson, professor of economics, and Dr. Mykol Hamilton, professor of psychology, have documented that gender bias is common today in many children’s books in their research published recently in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research titled “Gender Stereotyping and Under-Representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A 21st Century Update.” . . .

“Centre College,” huh? That’s where Area Man is studying, right?

According to the materials on its website, Centre College is ranked very high on some measures, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s an excellent place to get an education. Still, there’s something Onion-like about all of this.

P.S. I’m not knocking this research. Sure, the results are 100% unsurprising–if they’d found anything else, I’d have had to assume they’d made some sort of mistake. Nonetheless, there’s no harm in studying this sort of thing and keeping it in the news now and then. Some of their findings didn’t seem so horrible (“Female main characters nurtured more than did male main characters . . . more women than men appeared to have no paid occupation”: Those statements are true, on average, in the population, right?), but it’s always good to have these things measured. I also am not trying to slam or even mock Centre College for publicizing this work. Certainly, I’m always trying to get Columbia to publicize my own research findings. There’s just something funny about how the whole thing got put together in such an Onion-worthy way. “Sex Roles: A Journal of Research,” indeed.

24 thoughts on ““Gender Bias Still Exists in Modern Children’s Literature, Say Centre Researchers””

  3. I'll disagree with your suggestion that some of the findings do not seem so horrible–children's books influence young readers' world views and appropriate gender roles. If there's a disproportionate number of men in working roles (and women in nuturing roles), it impacts future distributions within the population.

  4. Andrew, you are the author of a book with a Dr. Seuss-inspired title that explores the surprising revelation that poor people tend to vote Democratic while rich people tend to vote Republican. There is something Onion-like in the extensive research and data analysis behind that conclusion, to say nothing of the pages of graphs.

  5. I'd also add that even if the headline conclusion isn't particularly noteworthy, the underlying data almost certainly is. Repeat this experiment every ten years and you can start to observe trends (which biases are growing/declining?) and correlation (does the proportion of working women follow move with the depiction of that 20 years prior? The other way around?)

    Research like this is silly in a vacuum, but makes contextual comparisons between time periods or places more rigorous. It can also help us try to tease out how much of female=nurturing is genetic, and how much is us acting out social roles.

  6. How in the world could they ever adjust for their own gender biases in their own coding of the data? Of course they're going to think female characters are more nurturing. A boy has a pet, it's a friend; a girl has a pet, it's a surrogate baby.

    If you have to suffix your journal name with A Journal of Research, there's a strong implicature that it's not a journal of research. In more (English) literary terms, "the journal doth protest too much, methinks."

    I just love this combination of sociolinguistics and statistics, which is more commonly found in Mark Liberman's posts on The Language Log.

  7. KS,

    that's a theory that would appear to need supportive evidence. I'm not saying the theory's wrong or the evidence is easy to come by, but if there's nothing conclusive on this, I'd advance these views with a little more caution.

  12. Feminist-inspired media studies like this used to be quite common, but less so now. I don't think their decline is due to the absence of the phenomenon, just the vagaries of academic fashion. At any rate, I'm glad to see an update, although I also wonder about why it took 6 years to code 200 kids books.

    A truly Onion-like story would study the types of toys in "girls" happy meals vs. "boys" happy meals. (Or, for that matter, why McDonald still feels it necessary to offer gender-specific happy meals. It's all the same plastic to go with one's plastic-tasting hamburger.) It'd also be interesting to look at who is most likely to ask for the "boys" happy meal for their girl kids, or vice versa. (Do any parents of boys ask for the "girls" toys? I'd bet this is much less frequent than the other way around because, yes, the girls' toys are typically boring. Who wants to comb a plastic dog's hair, per one of the "girl" Marmaduke happy meal toys?) I'd also anticipate a class gradient, even within the truncated class distribution of regular McDonald's goers.

    My point, other than late-night rambling, is that a story can be Onion-worthy and still tell us quite a bit about gender (and class) in everyday life.

  13. If you would like to compare across years, in recent years at least, there is the Amelia Bloomer list from the American Library Association. It looks for strong female role models in children's and young adult titles. The list has been getting longer as more books are being published meeting their criteria.

  14. Hi Andrew. Thanks for bringing up my research with Mykol Hamilton. As your readers suggest, it's good to keep tabs on sexism, especially in childrens' books, which turn out to influence children (and to some degree parents) regarding their roles in life. What does sound strange in that press release is the line about 6 years of reading the books. That sounds strange to me too. It was a much shorter project than that and I don't know where the release writer came up with 6 years. We have a companion piece on "Invisible Dads" (same Journal) that shows that childrens' books seldom if ever have dads feeding, touching, kissing, or carrying babies, among other things dad's do all the time. In the books, it's off to work dads go. Onionworthy? Maybe, but like obvious problems with war, the environment, education, and disease, it is only by bringing them to the forefront that we can expect to make progress. Of course, Columbia was one place ahead of Centre College in the Forbes "America's Best Colleges" rankings last year (http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/94/colleges-09_Americas-Best-Colleges_Rank.html), so you're probably right to make fun of us.

  15. David: I hope I made it clear that it was the news article, not the research itself, that looked so Onion-like. Also, as I noted but don't mind repeating, this is not meant as a criticism of Centre College. It just came out looking funny in the press release (which, I realize, you have little if any control over).

  16. At only 16 months old my first son developed an intense disdain for all things girlish, along with a corresponding passion for watching strong men hit balls with sticks. My wife discovered to her exasperated boredom that our tiny son instantaneously began to whine anytime she tried to flip past televised baseball or, God forbid, golf. When he later began throwing store-aisle temper tantrums whenever his mother denied him a flashlight (or toy sword, gun, spear, rocket ship, baseball bat, bow and arrow, screwdriver, slingshot, or whatever other projection device struck his hormone-warped fancy), she learned there was only one way to silence him. "That's a Girl Flashlight," she'd explain. "They're all out of Boy Flashlights. Do you still want it?"

    Believe me, dear readers, contrary to what we've been told so often in recent decades, socialization isn't what differentiates the sexes, it's the only hope of their ever getting along civilly.

  17. This is Mykol Hamilton, adding a little to David Anderson's astute comments.

    It's hard to tell sometimes from people's comments what or whom they're making fun of, even the things they say they're not making fun of. In this case, is it only about the news release? Or is it Centre College? ("Centre College, huh? Is that where Area Man is studying?") Maybe professors from Kentucky? ("…two professors from Kentucky needing 6 years to read and analyze 200 children's books.") Sex Roles? ("Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, indeed" and "If you have to suffix your journal name with A Journal of Research, there's a strong implicature that it's not a journal of research.")

    •As Andrew pointed out, Centre College is indeed very high in the rankings, for what they're worth (check us out in Forbes, US News & World Report, etc.). I can also say from 22 years' experience here that Centre is a top notch liberal arts school.

    •We professors at Centre College have degrees from the University of Michigan (Anderson), Harvard, Stanford (Hamilton), Yale, UCLA (Hamilton), Cal, Princeton, University of Chicago, Columbia, Duke (Anderson), and other fairly decent schools.

    •Multiple readers spent a summer reading and coding the 200 books on 115 variables, and we did our best to code in a valid, unbiased, and reliable way.

    •Sex Roles is a highly respected journal in the psychology of women and gender, peer reviewed and very selective.

    I appreciate the serious comments about the real issue here, sexism in children's books and the harm it causes. And I did get a chuckle out of much the humor, even if some of it involved cheap shots and a faulty aim! Yes, we feminists can take a joke :-). But I hope some of y'all will check out the journal and our articles, to see more clearly the serious side of the topic. Or feel free to write me to request copies.

  18. Feminist fundamentalism of this type has been in long term decline mostly due to women realizing that it doesn't explain the feelings of themselves and their children.

  19. Professor Hamilton,
    To be honest the ideological correctness of the study does concern me, and how ideological correctness permeates some areas of the social sciences concerns me too.

    Doesn't mean that you haven't found a real phenomenon here.

    "Sex roles" does seem to me to be at least a properly neutral title, as opposed to "Oppression of Women Quarterly" or some such thing.

  20. @Steve Sailer

    "Only" sixteen months? Sixteen months of socialization at a period of life when one's brain carrying out the most automatic, unconscious learning it will ever do hardly merits that qualifier. I recommend "Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps — And What We Can Do About It" by Lise Eliot for more info. Short version: some mild innate differences are known, but nothing that would justify the currently popular boy-brain/girl-brain gender essentialism. Socialization of infants, however, is highly gender-dependent.

  21. Wow, an experiment with a sample size of one. Totally convincing. And that confirms your existing bias. What could possibly go wrong?

    Talk about Onion-worthy. Thanks for the laugh.

  22. I recall Steven Pinker discussing the case of boys with malformed genitalia (sometimes surgically mutilated after birth) who were raised as girls. It didn't work out very well at all, because those boys just didn't feel like girls (with discovery of the truth leading to f-to-m surgery). I forget if it was Pinker or Judith Harris (or perhaps Pinker quoting Harris) who cited Trivers on genetic conflict. Children and parents naturally have different interests, so children are evolved not to be malleable at the hands of their parents (though they often have little power to get their way at the time, this explains why heritability increases as they become more autonomous). The importance people place on childhood experience is something of a throwback to Freud.

  23. @Wonks Anonymous

    Lise Eliot covers infant sex re-assignmenta bit in the book that I reference above. If I recall correctly, the chance of success of sex re-assignment is dependent on the age at which it is implemented — the younger the age, the higher the chance of success. The most well-known case of a failed infant sex re-assignment is that of David Reimer, who was re-assigned at 22 months.

  24. Actually, Sailer's sample size originally contained at least two data points; it's just that he decided to omit those which didn't confirm his existing bias.

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