Abstract
Gender bias exists in our language environment. We investigated personal name usage in two large corpora of language written for and by U.K. children aged 5–13. Study 1 found an overrepresentation of male names in children’s books, largely attributable to male authors. In stories written by over 100,000 children, Study 2 found an overall male bias that interacted with age. Younger children wrote more about their own gender. With age, girls became more balanced yet boys continued to show a strong male bias. Our findings demonstrate a male-centered bias in both children’s books and their own writing. We consider the power of written language to both shape and be shaped by cultural stereotypes via systematic biases in gender associations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2194-2204 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Child Development |
| Volume | 92 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Early online date | 6 Jul 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The Oxford Children’s Corpus is a growing database of writing for and by children developed and maintained by Oxford University Press for the purpose of children’s language research. The work for this article was supported by the British Academy Post‐Doctoral Fellowship (PF2/180013) awarded to Yaling Hsiao, and grants from The Leverhulme Trust (RPG‐2015‐070) and the Nuffield Foundation (EDO/43392) to Kate Nation, and resources made available to Nilanjana Banerji by the Department of Children’s Dictionaries and Children’s Language Data at Oxford University Press. Data and code associated with this article are available on the Open Science Framework Web site ( http://osf.io/m9arj ).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Child Development published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Pediatrics, Perinatology, and Child Health
- Education
- Developmental and Educational Psychology