Storybooks strengthen gender stereotypes and associations for kids: Study

A study has found that by the age of two children start believing in gender stereotypes such as boys are better at mathematics and girls at reading The research has been published in the Psychological Science Journal However a new study examined a different potentially underrecognised source of gender stereotypes and associations popular childrens booksResearchers found that storybooks contain many words that adults considered to be gendered and likely contribute to childrens gender knowledge We found that many popular childrens books often read to young children like Curious George and Amelia Bedelia contain rich information about gender that is presented in subtle ways said Molly Lewis a researcher with the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and lead author of the studyIn some cases the stereotypes in these books were stronger than in books targeted at adults she added Previous research on childrens books and gender stereotypes has relied mostly on content analysis Lewis and her team took a different approach They collected a corpus of 247 books commonly read to children ages 5 and under and asked adults to rate on a 5point scale how strongly the words in the books text were associated with masculinity and femininity An overall gender bias score was calculated for each bookBooks with the highest femininebias scores included Chrysanthemum Brave Irene and Amelia Bedelia according to the study Those with the highest masculinebias scores included Curious George Dear Zoo and Goodnight Goodnight Construction Site The Polar Express In the Night Kitchen and Hippos Go Berserk were rated as neutralThe researchers also used word embeddings a machine learning method to measure words gender associations beyond the adults ratings This approach identified patterns in genderrelated word neighbours which are terms that typically appear together across large bodies of text such as merry and Christmas in American EnglishThe analysis showed that childrens books vary widely in the number of gender associations they contained from strongly male to strongly female We found that books that we estimated to be genderbiased based on adult judgments also tended to be biased when we used this automated method Lewis saidThis is important because it suggests that some of the gender associations that emerge in adulthood begin to appear in the statistics of childrens texts and could potentially be learnable from exposure to childrens books Lewis added Machine learning was also used to examine whether gender stereotypes that social psychologists have uncovered in past behavioural experiments also appeared in childrens books For instance we found that the statistical patterns of words in these books reflected the stereotype that boys are good at math while girls are good at reading Lewis saidAnother unexpected result was that children tended to be exposed to books that conveyed gender stereotypes about their own gendergirls tended to be read books about girl characters boys tended to be read books about boy characters Lewis said These findings are important because they suggest that books may be inadvertently teaching young children about gender stereotypes Lewis addedOne unanswered question the research identified is how children learn stereotypes about other genders when they more commonly read books with stereotypes of their own gender The researchers suggested that children garner this information from media depictions and personal interactions And since many kids receive more information about their own gender they may have less precise intuitions about the stereotypes of other gendersOverall there were more female biases across the corpus than male biases However the research also revealed that gender portrayals varied across the books studied One implication of this finding is that parents may be able to influence childrens development of beliefs about gender through their choice of books Lewis saidAn encouraging finding she said is that not all storybooks contain gender stereotypes and some feature gender information that contradicts stereotypes We also found hints of historical change in how gender was depicted in childrens books Lewis said More recently published books were more likely to have female main characters and main characters without obvious gender associations Lewis concludedAlso Read Equality of the genders must begin at home