Male protagonists favoured when children write stories

STORIES written by children are more likely to have male protagonists because girls take a backseat in the books they read growing up, a study has found.

Researchers from the University of Oxford analysed more than 105,000 stories written by five to 13-year-olds for a BBC Radio 2 competition. They found that 75 per cent of boys used a male as the central character in their story.

The study showed, however, that as girls age they increasingly turn their attention to female-led stories. Almost 70 per cent of the characters created by five-year-old girls were female compared to 55 per cent among the 13-year-old authors.

The study suggests the reason for the dearth of female protagonists in stories written by children is a reflection of the books that they themselves grow up reading.

Their analysis of character gender in the Oxford Children’s Corpus, which is a catalogue of children’s books published from 1813 to present, found that just 38 per cent of characters in books are female.

Study author Yaling Hsiao told New Scientist: “If all boys read is about boys, they may not be motivated as much to think about the female perspective.

“Given these findings, it is reasonable to predict that boys encounter fewer female names when reading as they read less overall.”

Whilst looking at the Corpus, they further found that since 2005, the rate at which male authors wrote about boys increased too.

Jennifer Rodd, an academic specialising

‘It seems likely that children have learned that the actions of boys and men are more likely to be exciting’

in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology of language comprehension at University College London, commented: “There are no quick fixes to the issues raised in this work.

“It seems likely that children have learned, from the books that they read or from society more generally, that the actions of boys and men are more likely to be sufficiently exciting and interesting to be worth writing about.”