The study was called “Gender Stereotyping and Under-representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Picture Books: A Twenty-first Century Update.”
The authors looked at the top-selling books in 2001 and a seven-year sample of Caldecott Award-winning books.
What did they find:
That “images of men continue to dominate children’s picture books.”
-There were nearly twice as many male as female title and main characters
with male characters appearing in 53 percent more illustrations than females
-Female main characters were more nurturing
-Men were shown outdoors more often and women were seen indoors more
In 2005 the same team authored another study “Gender role stereotyping of parents in children’s picture books: the invisible father”
What did they find:
-There was not one image that showed a father kissing, hugging or feeding a baby in the books sampled for the study. Not one.
“Images of men continue to dominate” & “invisible father”. A poisonous combination that is so far from the reality of so many families yet maintains a covert grip on the imagery of our culture.
We need some Alternadad picture books. Quick!
To confuse the matter a bit this article was published today in the Telegraph. The article was titled “Photo Books ‘better for toddlers than pictures’ “.
The research suggests that “Very young children learn faster from picture books that contain colour photographs than from books with colour drawings”
The study:
A group of toddlers look at picture books to learn how to make a toy rattle.
The results:
The kids who looked at a color photo of the rattle did twice as well as the ones who looked at an illustration of a rattle.
Maybe photographs do help toddlers put things together faster but they don’t come close to the power of illustration in a child’s life and to title the article “Photo Books ‘better for toddlers than pictures’ ” seems a bit irresponsible and misleading.
Liz Attenborough, a children’s book publisher, summed it up perfectly:
“Maybe if you want to instruct a child to do something, a clear picture is better. A child will learn in the pure sense of the word,…But if you want to tell a story, and stimulate the imagination, how dull is a photograph of a series of posed ‘fairies’ in a fairytale, for example?”