The past few years has seen quite a number of women celebrities speak up about unfair treatment at workplaces, leading to a lot of discussion on measures that can be taken to improve the situation. It wouldn't be wrong to say sexism is one of the worst evils women face today, and a portion of the blame for this crisis should be levied on children's reading materials.
It's time we weed out casual sexism that's ingrained in children's reading material.
A new study conducted by The Observer and market research company Nielsen found that lead roles in children’s picture books often belonged to men, and males were more likely to have speaking parts in the books. If at all there were females, they tend to be sidekicks, the research found.
Males were depicted as powerful characters and females were shown as weak and vulnerable.
The Observer and Nielsen came to this conclusion after analysing the 100 bestselling children's books of 2017.
Interestingly, this is not the first time a research has highlighted the sexism featured in children’s books.
In 2011, researchers from Florida State University, who analysed children’s books published between 1900 and 2000, revealed that it was twice as likely the lead character would be male. When it came to books with animal characters, male animal heroes featured in three times more books than female animal heroines.
Study author Professor Janice McCabe, professor of sociology at Florida State University said: "We looked at a full century of books.
"One thing that surprised us is that females' representations did not consistently improve from 1900 to 2000; in the mid part of the century it was actually more unequal. Books became more male dominated."
"Together with research on reader interpretations, our findings regarding imbalanced representations among animal characters suggests that these characters could be particularly powerful, and potentially overlooked, conduits for gendered messages.
"The persistent pattern of disparity among animal characters may even reveal a subtle kind of symbolic annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery."
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