Thought I'd share this. I never would have guessed that the gender disparity was so great. It would be interesting to see how the 21st century is doing so far...
I would love to hear any thoughts/comments.
http://gas.sagepub.com/content/25/2/197.abstract
Hello Elizabeth:
ReplyDeleteDrawing from our years of teaching 11-18 year olds, most of the modern fiction published for younger children featured male principal characters. So we are not surprised to read these statistics.
However, a book by Anne Tyler [we think] whose title we cannot recall, artfully led the reader to believe that the central character was a boy and only at the end was it revealed that she was a girl.
It would be interesting to see what the overall gender split is in that demographic during that time period -- i.e., is the gender split of those reading (or being read to) 57-43 boys? Why do we think authors chose male characters (or are publishers only selecting the male-led stories)? I think it would be really cool to write a story where the gender of the main character was conspicuously neutral.
ReplyDeleteIn response real quickly to Elf, mostly girls and women read if all the males I know along with all the females are an indication.
ReplyDeleteI think part of the reason for this is that girls will read stories about males but the other way around has always been considered too sissyish. Alse, girls are seen as too sedate to have the adventures the males have which is untrue but when has the truth gotten in the way of business?
Hi there! I've just followed the link to your blog from a comment. I've been enjoying your illustrations very much. I just wanted to say that the first book that came to my mind when reading this post was a trilogy by Monica Furlong, of which Juniper and Wise Child both have female centre characters. I haven't read the third book, it's called Coleman and I believe it's about one of the male characters that the little girl ends up marrying :) I'm looking forward to reading it very much.
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