Research Study Reveals Stories Created by Children are More Likely to Have Male Personalities

A trio of scientists at the University of Oxford has discovered that male characters appear more frequently than female characters in stories written by kids of either sex. In their paper published in the journal Society for Research in Child Development, Yaling Hsiao, Nilanjana Banerji, and Kate Country explain their analysis of short stories created by thousands of British kids for a BBC story writing competition.

The job started as the researchers asked themselves whether sex contributes to how children compose stories. They acquired electronic copies of the stories written by kids for the BBC contest and examined them to find trends. To determine if one sex was more or less likely to appear in the kid’s tales, the researchers scanned over 100,000 stories using software to count character names. Significantly, they initially used cross-referenced names in England and Wales birth registries to determine which characters were utilized for males and females. Names were traditionally male or female if 60% of those noted in the windows registries were provided to a girl or a boy.

They discovered that girls and boys tend to write mainly about male characters, but there were some distinctions. The boys featured males in their stories roughly 75% of the time, and that average was maintained as they aged. Young girls did approximately the same, around 70% of the time; however, things altered as they got older– female characters began showing up more frequently. By the time they reached age 13, the amount of male to female characters had decreased to 50%.

To learn why male characters appeared in kids’ stories more often than females, the scientists also searched and evaluated characters in publications written by adults for kids from 1813 to the present. They discovered that just 38% of the characters in them were female-as well as it was not due to the unwarranted influence of older publications. Modern publications created for KIDS still feature primarily male characters.

Originally published on Phys.org. Read the original article.

Reference: Yaling Hsiao et al, Boys Write About Boys: Androcentrism in Children’s Reading Experience and Its Emergence in Children’s Own Writing, Child Development (2021). DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13623