Gender Imbalance in Children's Literature

I loved it when my Mom or Nana read to me as a young girl. My mom claims that she even read to me when I was still in her womb. Til this day, I love to read and I owe it to them showing me the importance as well as the magic of books. Books can be powerful tools, but what about when they send the wrong messages? Particularly to little girls? There have been studies done within the last decade that has shown an imbalance between the amount of male characters in children's books compared to female characters. Also, it has to do with the way the female characters are represented.

If you remember your favorite books as a child, what were they? A few of mine were:

• The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
• Love You Forever by Robert Munsch
• Tales like The 3 Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood
• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff
• Dr. Suess books like Cat in The Hat

Of the books I listed above, the only book with a female protagonist in it is Little Red Riding Hood (who I must add is led astray by a male wolf character and is not really the best model for young girls). I can't think of many other books I was read as a child that had any strong females in them, but I also don't know if that bothered me or not then. I do know that as an adult in college, I have struggled with career goals and school in general. Always good at reading and English, arts and humanities courses, but not at science or math. I never thought I could be good at those, and if I wanted to be, I would have to work extra hard beyond the boys. I dreamed of being a Marine Biologist when I was 8+ for example, and when I started taking Biology courses in college, I didn't think I could do it. I also had a hard time staying in sports like soccer, and instead do jazz and hip hop dancing. As you can see, the things I am "better" at or opted to do instead of the more "masculine" things ended up putting me a typical female mold.

So does the gender imbalance in children literature really make a difference? According to new research, it sends children a message that "women and girls occupy a less important role in society than men or boys." Between a whole century of childrens books being published, there were about 6,000 (1900-2000). What was found by Janice McCabe, a professor of sociology at Florida State University, is that "males are central characters in 57% of children's books published each year,  with just 31% having female central characters. Male animals are central characters in 23% of books per year, while female animals star in only 7.5%." Another fun fact is that in the books in which a character was not assigned a gender, the parents are automatically filling it in with being male. This includes books with skyscraper characters, or snowplows characters, the non-human ones. We should want to show little girls that girls can be anything, and anything can be a girl.

In the video below posted by Rebel Girls, a mother and a daughter are examining a bookshelf full of children's books. They remove books with zero male characters in them, only pulling a shocking THREE books. Then they do the opposite, and pull SEVENTY-THREE books that had zero females in them. They go on to pull ones with females, but that don't have speaking roles, etc. It's a really interesting video and helps put more in to perspective the fight for women to fit in as a normal human being, who is simply a human!...and a human that fits a role in society just as a male does.