Gender Bias In Children's Books Essay

Gender Bias in Children’s Books Reading to children and allowing them to read on their own is an essential part of development. By reading to children we help to encourage the growth of their vocabulary amongst numerous other things. But, is the time spent reading to help them also helping them learn about gender roles and gender stereotypes? Studies done by Weitzman, McCabe and others over the years have looked at children’s books to evaluate the representation of males and female. They reviewed the books for many different qualities some of these qualities were the use of a male or female in the title, gender of the central character in the story, and the roles these characters played within the story. McCabe and her colleagues reviewed …show more content…
Eight of the books read for this evaluation utilized a female as their lead character. In Amazing Grace not only is the lead character a young African American girl most of the characters in the story are either girls or women. There is only one boy, a classmate of Grace’s that is given a line in the story though other boys are shown in Grace’s class. The remaining twenty books are split six books feature a male as their lead character and the remaining six focused on either an entire family or had a pair of leads, one male and one female. The books read for this examination displayed a relatively fair spread for lead characters unlike those in McCabe’s work, “no more than 33 percent of books published in a year contain central characters who are adult women or female animals, whereas adult men and male animals appear in up to 100 percent” (McCabe, 209). The children’s books written by Bob Graham focused more on the family unit than on any one member of the family and the families in his stories appear to be less concerned with fitting gender stereotyped