Balancing the books

As new research highlights the imbalance of gender representation in children’s books, decided to ask kids what they think.

The girls are getting fired up. The boys are saying that girls’ books are all about picking flowers and patting unicorns and the girls are hands-onhips adamant this is not the case.

‘‘We go on adventures too,’’ throws back Amy Silk, a 10-year-old who has something to say and does it with a pointed finger.

The boys scoff, the girls huddle and the two adults in the room look at each other.

New research about gender representation in New Zealand children’s books is being talked about here in the senior class of Kiwitea School in rural Manawatu¯.

It would seem gender portrayal in books has fallen out of step with the gender expectations of a new generation of girls and it is getting some of them foot-stomping mad.

‘‘Boys think we can only be mums and sisters in books. But we can be the prime minister,’’ says 12-year-old Ava Thomas.

The study looked at a Nielsen BookData list of the top 100 bestselling New Zealand children’s books – those books with Kiwi creators and publishers – in 2017 and it found that just 13 per cent of books in the top 100 have femaleonly main characters. Fifty-three per cent are male-led, 22 per cent carry a mix of gender leads and in the leftover 12 per cent, gender is irrelevant.

What has been happening? The kids at Kiwitea School say they choose the books that are there on the shelf and the books they are given to read by their parents.

The kids read the books, but it is adults who write them, and although there is a nearly equal split between male and female authors, male characters dominate. The balance is off and it is on the shoulders of the adult writers and publishers that it wobbles.

Most of the boys in the class of 25 say they want to read about adventures, with heaps of action, and that is echoed by the girls. The difference is that the girls don’t care what gender the characters are, just as long as it’s a good story.

Travel 40 kilometres into Palmerston North from Kiwitea and there is a different set of kids, with a strikingly contrasting outlook. Monrad Intermediate is a low-decile school in comparison with Kiwitea and while talking to a group of three girls and three boys it becomes apparent their views are different to their country neighbours.

The boys in this room like reading books with girl and boy characters and they don’t mind who takes the lead.

The girls agree with the boys and there is no heated discussion, just an 11-year-old who offers up his opinion that because they have lots of ‘‘different types of people’’ at their school, ‘‘we are interested in lots of different things’’.

Eleven-year-old Sophia Raston says she doesn’t think it is fair that there are more boy characters in books and Joshua Bourke, 12, agrees with her.

‘‘I really liked The Goodnight Stories For Rebel Girls book. The stories were good. There should be more books like that maybe.’’

Kids are forming their own ideas about gender, ideas that are bounced off and developed from where they are from and who they are influenced by. Books, too, can inform the way they think. Books, too, can give them a sense of who they are in this world.

Palmerston North children’s book author Glynn Harper says that maybe it is just as simple as making sure that strong women are also represented. He is New Zealand’s leading war historian and writes at least one children’s book a year. They are always war stories based on a true happening and last year he made a conscious decision to write about a woman.

And she’s a feisty one at that. Gladys Sandford fixed engines. She was the first woman to gain her pilot’s licence and when World War I hit, Gladys became an ambulance driver and a hero. ‘‘Even though she was told that women are not supposed to be adventurous,’’ says Harper.

‘‘I found the story of Gladys by accident and it was such a great story that I wanted to develop it. And in the back of my mind was the fact that there weren’t really a great number of stories that had female role models.’’

Harper used to be a primary school teacher and says that No 1 for him is to encourage kids to read, so telling a good yarn is foremost in his mind when he decides what to write.

‘‘My worry is that we might be forcing an agenda on our children and I would hate for anything to come in the way of stopping kids from reading good-quality, interesting stories that provoke their curiosity to read and learn. If we get in the way of that, I think we would be doing them a disservice.’’

Another Manawatu¯ children’s book author, Jo Guy, agrees, saying she has been in and out of enough schools to know that the thing that should always come first is a good story, ‘‘one that encourages kids to read’’. Guy says gender balance is not something she thinks about when she sits down to write.

‘‘If you really get into a kid’s world, it’s not complicated. The gender thing, I’m not sure about. I think we need strong characters and we need to encourage our kids to be the best they can be, no matter what. That’s what I think about when I write, not gender.’’

Illustrator and cartoonist Brent Putze says although he didn’t consciously decide to make his character Belle a stereotypical kickass girl, he did know he was basing her on strong women he knew and admired.

‘‘She was at first really based on my daughter. I did a card for Meg and this character emerged with bright red hair. It was Belle, a square peg in a round hole. She does things her way rather than what society has thrown at her.

‘‘As Belle developed, she has taken on other people that I have known with big personalities, women mostly, who have faced similar types of battles. And me as well, I am in Belle, too.

‘‘Is she a girl or a boy? She’s a girl, but she is really just Belle. She is not accepting of the norm and does that make her an out-there female? Or just a person?’’

Pippi Longstocking, Lucy from Peanuts, Beryl the Peril, Putze says they are in Belle too. The characters that Putze loved as a kid were the strong, giving-it-their-all-with-a-fistto-society women.

Putze says the more strong female characters out there for children the better, and less of the Disney-style ‘‘idealised female characters’’ is what needs to happen.

‘‘What messages are we giving kids? Images can be very strong for kids and Belle is just nothing like a Disney girl, she is an individual. We are still putting women in situations where they are dominated by men every day and I guess what we need to look at is does the literature we are giving our kids reflect that? Is it causing it, or reflecting it?’’

Juliet Jacka is the creator of the Frankie Potts series and her experience of having to think about gender in children’s books came about when a publisher asked her to swap her character from male to female. Jacka set about switching her original Artie Potts boy character to Frankie Potts, the girl character who now stars in her books. Jacka says what she found was that actually she didn’t have to do much at all.

‘‘The characteristics of Artie rang true for Frankie, so it was much easier than I initially thought it would be. I did really start to think about gender in my books from then on.’’

It makes for interesting thinking and it is the sort of thing that longtime bookseller Bruce McKenzie has been pondering well before there was research on the issue. For years, he has been pushing aside ‘‘whether the book is being bought for a boy or a girl’’ and instead he prompts parents and grandparents to think beyond gender.

‘‘I try to neutralise. We have always had a mixed children’s section, no boy and girl division, and I have stayed away from pink and blue. I do get a bit upset when people say things like: ‘Oh no, he’s a boy and he would want something with trucks’, and I feel like saying: ‘But no, he might like something on flowers or dancing or something’.’’

McKenzie says, as in many things, it also comes down to consumerism and what sells. ‘‘Publishers need to sell books, of course, so that is reflected in what is produced.’’

In the study on those top 100 bestselling New Zealand children’s books, by Elizabeth Heritage, New Zealand publishers were looked at and it was noted that none had official gender diversity policies.

‘‘Some publishers mention that editors keep an eye on gender balance and work with authors and illustrators to even it out a bit, suggesting that the manuscripts that come in might be a bit one-sided. Some publishers have thought deeply about gender and are keen to speak about it. Others say good storytelling is their priority.’’

And our kids? Well Sophia Raston wanted to say one more thing after her group had discussed the issue in the principal’s office at Monrad Intermediate. She wanted to say that it’s not about being a boy or a girl, ‘‘because we are just people and we are all different. If everyone was the same, the world would be a boring place’’.

And, as for Amy Silk, with her hands on her hips? She says with a dramatic roll of her eyes directed squarely at the boys, ‘‘and don’t even get me started about fairies and unicorns’’.