How picture books can compete effectively with other children’s media

In July this year I gave a COOL not CUTE themed seminar at the UKLA International Conference in Brighton. Having spent quite a lot of time putting it together I thought I’d share a transcript of it here along with the video clips and some of the slides from my presentation.

The seminar got a polarised response from the small group of delegates that attended it. While several commended me on a persuasive argument, another told me that she had disagreed with almost every word I’d said.

Click on the small slide images to see larger versions

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COOL not CUTE

How picture books can compete effectively with other children’s media

I’ve called this session COOL not CUTE which is also the title of an essay I wrote a couple of years ago about the relationship between picture book content and the literacy gender gap. Most of the points I’ll be making in this seminar can be found in Part 2 of that essay.

I’m going to set aside the gender element of the argument today and focus on the differences in content between picture books and other children’s media. I think these differences are helping to drive children of both sexes away from books and towards TV, films and video games at a very early age.

I’m a children’s author and most of my books are picture books. I’ve been working in the publishing industry for 15 years. During that time I’ve had picture books published by 11 different publishers, so I’ve a fairly broad experience in picture book publishing.

I try to write picture books that appeal to a wide range of tastes. There’s no question that we publish a great many picture books in this country that a great many children find appealing. But there are also a lot of children that don’t find picture books appealing. And it’s those children I want to talk about today.

Research shows that a growing number of children regard reading as as “uncool”. Here's a couple of quotes from the Literacy Trust web site.

First impressions are important – and the first books most children encounter are picture books. I think the picture book industry’s current standards of age-appropriateness are a lot more conservative than those of children’s films, TV and video games. As a consequence a lot of the content that children regard as “cool” that’s found in these other media is missing from picture books. I’m going to highlight some of this missing content and offer an explanation for these differing standards of age appropriateness.

Picture books are read by a wide age range; they are read TO children who are only a few months old and read BY children up to the age of seven or eight.

The nub of the problem is that standards of age appropriateness that are suitable for preschool children are routinely applied to all picture books, including those read by school age children.

Four is the age that most children start school in the UK. I think we need to recognise four as a watershed age for picture book content and I'm going to be focussing on the sort of content that's age appropriate for four years and over.

Four years and over is also the age range that the BBFC has in mind when assessing the age-appropriateness of U certificate media. As well as films, the BBFC certify children’s TV shows when they’re released as DVDs or downloads. There’s now a separate certification body, PEGI, for video games, that operates on similar lines.

While I think it would be unreasonable to compare picture books with anything other than U certificate media, it’s worth pointing out that many picture-book-age children are watching PG and even 12 certificate media.

There are many differences between the content of picture books and other children’s media, but I’m going to focus on four elements today – COMBAT, PERIL, VILLAINY and TECHNOLOGY.

All four of these elements are abundant in films, TV shows and video games watched or played by many four-year-olds, but are comparatively rare in picture books. I’ll illustrate this missing content with examples from four U certificate films.

All 4 of these films were the most popular U certificates in the year they were released. 3 of them were THE most popular film of any certificate in the year they were released. So they are all very mainstream examples. The last 3 films we'll look at were all released in the last 10 years, but I’m going to start with a film that was released 36 years ago.


Between the ages of 4 and 7 my son and most of his friends were obsessed with Star Wars. The original Star Wars film contains an abundance of peril, villainy & technology, but I’m going to use it to remind you of the sort of combat the BBFC deems age-appropriate for a four-year-old viewer.

There are about 20 minutes of combat in the film. I’m going to show you just 60 seconds taken from various scenes. This sort of content would be considered “cool” by many young children. As you watch this I want you to think about how often those children are likely to find similar content in picture books.

That film is 36 years old, but I could have shown you similar clips from U certificate films and TV TV shows that are showing in cinemas and on children’s television this weekend.

When I saw how enthusiastic my 4 year-old son was about these films I thought I’d try to channel some of that enthusiasm into reading by finding picture books that contained similar content – but there weren’t any. That was 14 years ago and there are still very few. And yet Star Wars is as popular as ever with young children and Disney have just begun making a new series of Star Wars films.

I mentioned this disparity to a picture book publisher last year and she told me that – despite it’s U certificate – she would not let a 4-year-old child watch a film like Star Wars. This attitude is not uncommon within children’s publishing. I think that one of the assumptions underlying it is that “depictions of combat in children’s media could make children more aggressive.” I’ll come back and address that assumption later.

I’m going to use a clip from Toy Story 3 to illustrate how peril is often depicted in children's films and television. The poster describes this film as a comedy and it is very funny in places, but it also contains scenes of peril that are played absolutely straight. I’m going to show you a particularly intense example. To put this clip in context: it comes at the end of a 20 minute sequence which starts with the toys breaking out of a kindergarten that’s run like a prison camp for toys. Throughout the sequence the characters narrowly escape from a series of increasingly perilous situations. As the clip starts, they’re in a rubbish dump and have just avoided being torn apart by a mechanical shredder.

I think you can see that that’s a genuinely scary moment. Young viewers are left in no doubt that the characters are facing what seems like certain destruction.

There’s a very fine line between what’s thrilling and what's upsetting for a four-year-old. Filmmakers like Pixar are very adept at judging exactly where that line lies, so that they can thrill young viewers by taking them very close to it without crossing over. In my experience, most picture book publishers prefer to play safe and to keep well away from that line. Scary scenes like the one we’ve just watched are relatively rare in picture books and I think that’s one of the things that gives many young children the impression that books are less cool than other children's media.

And that’s a shame because I think picture books are the ideal medium for presenting scary content, since they’re often read to children, particularly younger children, by an adult who's able to moderate the storytelling experience. If an adult comes across a scary scene, such as the one we've just seen, while reading to a child, the adult can say “this is scary” to let the child know that they’re not alone in there fears. And they can ask the child questions like, “Do you think they will be rescued?” to help the child anticipate a positive outcome. And yet children are far more likely to encounter content like that on a screen, than on a picture book page.

The next content element I’m going to highlight is villainy – to be more precise it’s irredeemable villainy. There are plenty of villains in picture books, but they tend to be relatively tame compared with the deadly villains children frequently encounter in other media. And very often picture book villains are obliged to see the error of their ways and redeem themselves by the end of the story. Picture book villains rarely meet a sticky end in the way they do in film or television.

The Incredibles is another film that has all four of the content elements I'm highlighting today. The villain in The Incredibles is called Syndrome. I’m going to show you two short clips. The first illustrates that not only is Syndrome a deadly villain, but that he has no qualms about killing children – something which is very rare in picture book villains. And the second shows him meeting a sticky end.

Again, as you’re watching this, I want you to think about how often a young child that thinks this sort of content is cool would come across scenes like these in a picture book.

I think one reason a lot of publishers are averse to including intense irredeemable villainy in picture books is that they are worried that “depictions of villainy in children’s media could make children more immoral.” That’s another assumption that I’m going to address a little later.

The final content element I want to look at is technology. This is a bit different from the other 3 elements we’ve looked at in that there’s no ethical aspect. But technology has a high cool factor for a lot of children and there’s a big difference between the way technology is commonly depicted in picture books and in other children’s media. I think that difference also reflects differing standards of age appropriateness.

Technology has a prominent role in many popular children’s films, TV shows and video games. Star Wars is brimming with sophisticated technology — spacecraft, vehicles, robots, weaponry — but I thought I’d bring things right up to date and looked at some of the technology from Despicable Me 2, which was THE most popular film at UK cinemas last year.



There are picture books that feature technology, but they tend to represent technology in a simplified way. You rarely see the attention to technical detail that you see in a Star Wars spacecraft or a Despicable Me gadget and technology tends to be less prominently presented in picture books. And it’s not just about visual detail, technical language, even simple words like “piston” are often deemed age-inappropriate for picture book texts.


So why are these four content elements, which are abundant in children films and TV shows, rare in picture books? The first reason is very straightforward – rejection. Many publishers don’t regard this content as appealing or age-appropriate for picture book readers.

The other thing that happens is “Bunnification”. This is a phrase I’ve borrowed from an illustrator who used it to describe how the scary, dangerous, technologically-sophisticated content found in children’s films and TV is often made safer, simpler, cuter or more whimsical for inclusion in picture books. While the cute, whimsical aliens and spacecraft found in books like Aliens Love Underpants are very popular with many young readers, they may seem tame and babyish to a child that prefers the more sophisticated aliens and spacecraft found in films like Star Wars.

There are some exceptions: my 4-year-old son would have adored Jonny Duddle's The King of Space had it been published a decade or two earlier, but picture books like this are still relatively few and far between.

If we want to create picture books that can match the mainstream appeal of the films we've looked at today, we have to be prepared to “cut out the cute”. While many publishers see cuteness as adding to a picture book’s appeal, many children see cuteness as making a book more babyish and uncool. We have to stop using “cute” as a default setting for picture books.


Before we go any further I’m going to address those two assumptions I mentioned that explain why many people are averse to including combat and irredeemable villainy in picture books. I’ve combined them into this statement:

“Depictions of combat and villainy in children’s media will make children more aggressive and immoral!”

So how does the BBFC justify the inclusion of combat and villainy in U certificate children's films and TV shows? This quote from the BBFC’s web site explains their approach:

“‘U’ films should be set within a positive moral framework and should offer reassuring counterbalances to any violence, threat or horror”. 

Essentially what they’re saying is that this sort of content is OK for four-year-olds, providing it’s carefully framed. Is that true? Or is this content likely to have a detrimental effect no matter how carefully it’s presented?  I’m a picture book author - I’m not qualified to answer that question, but I have a friend who is …

Claire Laurence is a psychologist at the University of Nottingham who specialises in the study of aggression and specifically in the factors that trigger aggression. When I first started looking at this content issue a couple of years ago, Claire helped me to write an essay called NATURE and NURTURE. The first two thirds of that essay is about sex differences in children’s preferences. But the last third deals with this question of whether or not depictions of combat and villainy in children’s media are likely to encourage aggressive, immoral behaviour in children.

Claire explained that it depends on how these depictions are framed. There is a lot of evidence that depictions of aggression that encourage the individual to identify with the aggressor, where aggressive behaviour is rewarded or depicted in a positive way can have a priming effect. For example, first person shoot-em-up video games, where aggressive behaviour earns higher scores have been shown to increase aggressive tendencies.

On the other hand, depictions of aggression that encourage the individual to identify with the victim, where aggressive behaviour is penalised or depicted in a negative way can have an inhibiting effect. And that’s why Claire felt that the BBFC approach to depictions of combat and violence in U certificate media was not only reasonable, but could be beneficial. While this distinction is widely recognised in other media, it’s not widely recognised in picture books which tend to avoid depictions of aggression altogether.


So why do picture books have differing standards of age-appropriateness to films and television? Age-appropriateness is a subjective judgement and I think these differences reflect who is making that judgement.

In the case of films and television, age appropriateness is determined by the BBFC who carry out public consultations every five years to ensure that their judgement reflects the view of the UK population as a whole. As well as consulting existing filmgoers, they carry out a "General Public Sample". As a statutory body, the BBFC is obliged to ensure that these consultations are demographically representative of gender, race, age, social class and regional differences in the UK population.

The age appropriateness of picture book content is largely determined by publishers. And while publishers' judgements are also informed by market research, that research tends to be based on the existing picture book market which is not demographically representative of the population as a whole.

As such, the standards of age appropriateness used in picture books tend to reflect the judgement of a narrower demographic. Both picture book publishers and picture book buyers are predominately white, predominately middle class and – and this is bit I usually get into trouble for - predominately female. The vast majority of picture book publishers and picture book buyers are women and I think that’s why a lot of the missing content I've highlighted today typically appeals to boys more than girls.

If we want every child in every home to engage with books from an early age, picture books need to follow the BBFC's example and adopt standards of age appropriateness that reflect the judgement of the population as a whole.

I started this seminar with these quotes about how children are increasingly embarrassed to be seen reading. As I said then, first impressions are important. I think conservative standards of age appropriateness in picture books are giving many children the impression that books are a safe, tame, uncool alternative to other media.

Obviously one size does not fit all. Every child is different and there are many children that won’t find the sort of content I’ve highlighted appealing.

I’m not arguing that we need this sort of content in ALL picture books! I am arguing that we need this sort of content in some picture books, if we want picture books to appeal to ALL children.

If we want all children to recognise that reading can be cool, we need many more picture books that are COOL and NOT CUTE!

The Protagonist Problem

I mentioned in an earlier post that, with the benefit of hindsight, the one missing boy-friendly ingredient I should not have included in my COOL not CUTE essay is “A Male Protagonist”.* I still stand by the points I made under that heading – many children find it easier to relate to protagonists that are the same sex as them, and publishers are generally far keener to publish picture books about female pirates than male fairies. However, given what I’ve since learnt about the pro-male imbalance in picture book protagonists, I now recognise that it’s inappropriate to include “A Male Protagonist” in a list of boy-friendly ingredients that are commonly missing from picture books.

I also recognise that — like the pro-female imbalance among children’s book award judges and children’s book reviewers — this pro-male imbalance needs addressing.

One of the articles that brought the issue to my attention was Two to One: Females outnumbered by males in British (and North American) children's picture books by children’s author and illustrator Eileen Browne. Browne argues that since half the UK’s population is female, half of the characters in UK picture books should be female too. In reality, male picture book characters outnumber females by a ratio of two to one. Browne explains that:

“Picture books help children reinforce their sense of place in the world around them. If the picture book world is dominated by males, then girls and boys can get a false view that males are more important and have more worth than females. If children hear the word 'he' twice as often as 'she' in the stories they experience, they are hearing that males have priority over females.”

Browne backs up the two to one statistic with evidence from various sources including an analysis of the main characters of Kate Greenaway Medal winning picture books between 1956 and 2010 carried out by Liza Miller, who is now my picture book editor at Walker Books. I must admit that when I first heard about Liza’s analysis I doubted that it was representative of contemporary picture books. Society has changed a lot in the last sixty years and there is far more gender equality in the Britain of 2014 than there was in the Britain of 1956. By including picture books from earlier generations in her count, I thought Liza might be presenting a distorted picture. One might expect, as I did, that the Greenaway-winning picture books from the late fifties and early sixties would be far less gender-balanced than those of the last decade. One might expect this, but in fact the opposite is true.

Click the image to see an enlarged version. Click here for a pdf of the data.

When I analysed the gender balance of the Greenaway award winning books from these two decades I discovered that exactly 50% of the main characters featured in the 1956-1965 books were female, compared with a mere 15% for the winners from 2004-2014.

Although the Greenaway Medal is awarded to an illustrator, character gender is usually determined by the book’s author (who may or may not be the illustrator as well). So I also analysed the gender balance of the authors from these periods. Between the two decades the proportion of female authors grew from 33% in 1956-1965 to 50% in 2004-2014. This last result also surprised me as I’d assumed that female authors might be more likely to write about female characters than male authors.  However when I separated the books according to author gender, I discovered that the even gender balance of main characters in 1956-1965 was equally reflected in the output of both the male and female authors from that period. And in the last decade there have been more men writing Greenaway-winning books with female main characters than there have been women.

It’s not wise to read too much into results from such a small sample size and it should be borne in mind that Greenaway-winning picture books may not be representative of the output of the whole picture book industry. An analysis using larger, more representative samples, such as the 50 bestselling picture books from 1956 compared with 2013, would present a more accurate picture if someone has the time to do it. However, if we assume that this sample is roughly representative, then it raises an interesting question. Why are picture book authors of both sexes less likely to create female main characters today than they were fifty years ago?

If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it has something to do with the belief that, while most girls are willing to read books with protagonists of either sex, most boys want to read books with male protagonists. So, in an attempt to appeal to both sexes, authors tend to opt for a male protagonist.

Although I think it’s true that boys tend to be more picky about protagonist gender than girls, I suspect this particular sex difference has more to do with nurture than nature. As I've commented before, modern society is “a lot more comfortable with girls being masculinised than boys being feminised”. In the last fifty years we've put far more effort into telling girls it’s OK for them to model themselves on male characters (real or fictional) than we have into telling boys it’s OK to model themselves on females.


While I share Eileen Browne’s view that the protagonist problem needs addressing, I suspect we may have differing views on how best to address it.

In COOL not CUTE I mentioned that Browne’s No Problem was one of my son’s favourite picture books when he was three years old. My son was fascinated by machines at this age and the story is about a group of animals who assemble a construction kit into a variety of vehicles. Although vehicle books typically appeal to boys, all five of the characters in the story are female. Another of Browne’s machine-themed picture books, Tick-Tock, also has an all-female cast. There are countless picture books about machines and vehicles that feature all-male casts and I assume that Browne deliberately gave these books all-female casts in an attempt to redress the balance and to encourage girls to take an interest in technology. However if, as Browne argues, picture books with all-male casts present children with a “false view” of the world, then surely picture books with all-female casts present an equally “false view”.

I must have read No Problem to my son more than a hundred times. Although the text makes it clear that none of the characters are male, my son persisted in referring to all of them as "he”, despite my equally persistent corrections. While some might claim that this showed that my three-year-old was already prone to gender-stereotyping, I think he did this because it was easier for him to relate to characters if he assumed they were the same sex as him. When writer Michelle Nijhuis’s five-year-old daughter responded similarly to The Hobbit, insisting that Bilbo was a girl, Nijhuis re-gendered the character, changing Bilbo from a “he” to a “she” for the rest of the book. While I didn’t re-gender any of the characters in No Problem or Tick Tock for my son, his response to these books made me think that their tit for tat approach, countering exclusion with further exclusion (albeit of the opposite sex), was less than ideal. As my mother often told me as a child, "two wrongs don't make a right".

The gender ratio of the main characters in my own picture books is only slightly better than two to one. 36% of the main characters in my 30 published picture books are female. This is clearly an area in which I could do better. However, I’ve always made a conscious effort to make the worlds of my stories gender-balanced and 46% of the wider casts** of my picture books are female. It’s not a rigid rule and there are exceptions; my picture book Pigs Might Fly was written as a sequel to The Three Little Pigs and features the same all-male cast of characters.

If we want picture books to reflect the gender balance of the real world, then we need more stories that feature BOTH sexes. That way both boys and girls will be able to find characters they can readily relate to, whether the story is about machines or merpeople, building sites or ballet-dancing.

Click here to download a pdf of the data from the analysis

* This ingredient was cut from the list for the revised essay published in February 2015
** including main characters

Some words of support

I was heartened by Jon Scieszka's comments
on the Playing by the book blog.

It’s been a couple of months since I last posted on this blog. In my last post I wrote that I was “arguing for gender-balance and against gender domination by either sex.” With this in mind, I’m planning a future post about the pro-male bias in picture book protagonists which, as I’ve previously acknowledged, is an issue that needs addressing as much as the pro-female bias in other aspects of picture book content.

In the meantime, having focused on the critical responses to my call for gender balance in my last two posts, I wanted to highlight a few of the more supportive responses.

I’ve commented before that many people within the world of children’s literature are reluctant to speak publicly about a possible pro-female gender bias in picture book content. Some of the vitriolic responses my arguments have provoked in the last few months make this all the more understandable. In the week after The Times article was published, I received the following comment in an email from a picture book editor:

"This is such an interesting debate. I think you have raised so many good points, which makes it frustrating that so many people – the media, authors on twitter – seem to jump to such extreme or polarised positions on the matter. It would be great to be able to have a sensible, more nuanced discussion about it all without people ‘shouting’ so much! The points you have raised really deserve to be discussed properly."

And, as I mentioned in my last post, another of my editors, Liza Miller, voiced her support publicly on her blog, for which I’m extremely grateful.

The blog post that provoked the media interest focussed on the lack of gender-balance in children's book reviewing, so I was also grateful to Spectator reviewer Melanie McDonagh for beginning her summer round-up with some words of support. And – although he didn't take sides  – I’d also like to thank publishing journalist Porter Anderson for taking the time to understand my argument and outline it accurately and objectively in this article for Publishing Perspectives.

US novelist Elizabeth Spann Craig (who writes for adults) wrote a blog post acknowledging that my observations about gender bias in picture book content reflected her own experience of trying to find books that appealed to her son, commenting that it was "much, much easier" finding books that her daughter enjoyed. However, apart from a few comments on Twitter, the children’s authors and illustrators that expressed their support for my arguments have, until now, done so privately.

So I was heartened to read the comments of US author Jon Scieszka on Zoe Toft’s Playing by the book blog yesterday. As well as writing numerous children's books, Jon is a former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (the US equivalent to the UK’s Children’s Laureate) and the founder of the Guys Read literacy programme. Zoe asked Jon several questions relating to boys' literacy, including this one about the arguments I've made on this blog:

Zoe: Recently there was a lot of debate and even anger here in the UK about the gendered marketing of books, a debate sparked by the author Jonathan Emmett, who argues that the UK “picture book industry reflects girls’ tastes more than it does boys’ and that this bias is exacerbating the gender gap between boys’ and girls’ reading abilities.”

To what extent do you think the same could be said for the US market?

Jon Scieszka: I think Jonathan Emmett made a very thoughtful, considered, statistical, and careful presentation about the realities of children’s publishing. The statistics and challenges he mentions for the UK are very much the same in the US. Here elementary school teachers, librarians, children’s booksellers, and children’s book prize committee members are mostly women. It is not unreasonable to wonder if this gender inequality might influence what is produced and bought and awarded in children’s books.

And I think the anger this question provokes is more about gender inequality in the wider world at large than just about kids’ books.

It’s well worth reading the full interview over on Zoe’s blog.

Another commentator who seems to think they know my views better than I do

I wrote a post back in April in response to some of the articles and blog posts I’d seen rejecting my call for more gender-balance in the world of picture book publishing and in picture book reviewing in particular. I commented then that some of my critics devoted their time to attacking “straw men” misrepresentations of my arguments rather than attempting to address my actual views. I also noted that none of these critics attempted to answer the question posed by the post that prompted the media interest - why should gender-balance be important to adult book reviewing, but irrelevant to children’s book reviewing?

Lefa Singleton Norton wrote a comment piece along similar lines for the news section of Australian broadcaster SBS’s web site today. I don’t respond to every such piece, but this time I took the bait and wrote a response in the comment section which I’ve also posted below. The first four paragraphs will be familiar to those who’ve read my recent posts, but I’ve made some new points in the subsequent paragraphs, which I thought were worth sharing on this blog.

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There are so many wrongful assumptions and misrepresentations of my argument in this piece that I hardly know where to start. I’m not at all “put out” by the failure of men “to dominate the modern publishing industry.” I’m arguing for gender-balance and against gender domination by either sex.

On page 15 of my COOL not CUTE essay I wrote this:

"I’d like to stress that I don’t believe that men are any more suited than women to these gatekeeper roles. If anything I think men are generally less suited, for reasons I’ve outlined in my separate article, NATURE and NURTURE. Individuals of both sexes inevitably bring some degree of subjectivity to their selection of reading material; it’s simply that male gatekeepers would generally bring a more boy-centred subjectivity."

I think we need more men in gatekeeper roles in UK picture book publishing, for exactly the same reason that I think we need more women in the UK Parliament and in the UK judiciary - because these groups ought to represent and serve both sexes equally!

I’ve always acknowledged that men are to blame for this problem. Here’s the penultimate paragraph from the conclusion of my COOL not CUTE essay:

"Over the 17 years I’ve been working in the industry, I’ve met hundreds of wonderful people in schools, libraries and publishing houses who are doing their utmost to engage children of both sexes in reading picture books; many of them do so on a voluntary basis. The overwhelming majority of these “wonderful people” have been women. As I said earlier, outside of writing and illustrating, few men seem to want to be involved with picture books. So let me make this clear — if one demographic group is chiefly to blame for the state of affairs I’ve outlined, it is adult men, for failing to take sufficient interest in what young children are reading."

So, yes, men are to blame for the problem, but does most men’s lack of engagement with the problem justify turning a blind eye to it? As Mary Curnock Cook, the head of UK’s Universities and Colleges Admissions Service commented recently, if we want a gender-balanced society, we need to encourage men to get involved in areas traditionally dominated by women just as much as we need to encourage women to get involved in areas traditionally dominated by men.

VIDA's gender analysis of US
Children's Book Awards.
Female authors are shown in BLUE,
male authors in RED.

Singleton Norton’s article mentions my efforts to get the judging of the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals, the UK’s “oldest and most prestigious children's book awards”, judged by a gender-balanced panel. Although the awards are given to books for children of both sexes, for the last two years all 13 judges on the panel have been female. I suspect that Singleton Norton would be less dismissive of my argument if I was calling for more gender-balance in an all-male judging panel. She cites VIDA’s “comprehensive list of awards” as demonstrating that “men dominate the charts and the top prizes”. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page on the VIDA site you can see a set of pie charts showing the gender balance of US children’s book awards. Women are shown in BLUE and men in RED. I can’t help wondering if Singleton Norton has got these two colours confused as the dominant colour in these charts seems to be blue (female).

Yes, there is a gender-balance problem with picture book protagonists, with male protagonists outnumbering females. I confess that I was not aware of the scale of the problem when I wrote the COOL not CUTE essay and, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s probably the one “missing ingredient” listed in the essay that I would omit if I were writing it today. One of the people who brought the protagonists issue to my attention is Liza Miller who wrote a dissertation on the subject and has since become my editor at Walker Books. The under-representation of female characters is clearly an issue that needs addressing, however I don’t think a bias towards male protagonists can be taken to demonstrate a pro-male bias across picture book content as a whole. While I’m sure we might not agree on every detail, Liza and I don’t see our two arguments as being in conflict; we both believe the world of picture books would benefit from being more gender-balanced, both in protagonists AND in gatekeeper roles. Singleton Norton is not the only commentator to rubbish my call for gender-balance and I’m indebted to Liza for voicing her support for my argument in this post on her blog.

Singleton Norton concludes her piece with the claim that my “belief that profits and sales shouldn’t come before gender equality only applies to the one very narrow count where women are statistically overrepresented.” Singleton Norton knows nothing of my wider opinions, so on what evidence is this claim based? Her argument seems to be more rooted in ideology and assumption than evidence.

UKLA Conference Seminar

I’m presenting a COOL not CUTE seminar at this year’s UKLA International Conference which is being held at the University of Sussex from Friday 4th to Sunday 6th July.

My seminar is on Saturday 5th July at 14:00 in room 135 (session I7) . The session is only 40 minutes long, so I’m setting gender issues aside and just focusing on the differences in content between picture books and other children’s media which I think are helping to drive many children away from books at an early age.

Here’s the outline for my session from the conference brochure:

COOL not CUTE: How picture books can compete more effectively with other children’s media 

The National Literacy Trust’s ‘Children's and Young People's Reading in 2012’ report (published October 2013) shows that a growing number of children see reading as an ‘uncool’ activity,“are increasingly embarrassed to be seen reading” and are spending less of their own time with books. Conversely, children are spending more time with electronic media such as television and video games.

For many children the perception that books are not as ‘cool’ as other media will have more to do with content than the media itself. First impressions are important – and the first books most children encounter are picture books.

This session will examine the way in which ‘cool’ content elements such as combat, technology, villainy and peril are represented in popular U certificate children’s media and contrast this with the relatively tame way in which these elements are usually represented in picture books.

The more liberal standards of age appropriateness evident in U certificate children’s media are based on demographically representative research. This session will argue that if picture books reflected similar standards of age appropriateness, they would appeal to a wider, more diverse readership and be able to compete more effectively with other children’s media.

I’ll be arguing that the standards of age appropriateness used in picture books are a lot more conservative
than those used in other age-appropriate children’s media including popular U certificate films.

It’s the first time I’ve been to the conference, so I’m not sure what to expect! If you’re attending yourself, please come along and say hello. There will be time for a 10 minute Q and A session after the seminar, but do get in touch if you’d like to get together for a longer chat.

Find out more about the conference on the UKLA web site

Download a conference flyer & booking form

Four clarifications in light of last week’s media hoo-ha

I’m still catching up on some of the media coverage that came as a result of this blog post about the need for more gender balance in children’s book reviewing and the associated article in The Times. 

While some commentators took the time to look beyond The Times article's provocative headline to discover my actual views, others wrote articles or blog posts attacking claims that they imagined I was making.

STRAW MEN: Some commentators wrote articles and blog posts attacking imaginary arguments.

So here are four clarifications concerning my actual views:

1: I'm NOT claiming that “women are to blame” for the literacy gender gap!

Here's the penultimate paragraph from the conclusion of my COOL not CUTE essay which contains my main argument and has been on this site since it went online.

"Over the 17 years I’ve been working in the industry, I’ve met hundreds of wonderful people in schools, libraries and publishing houses who are doing their utmost to engage children of both sexes in reading picture books; many of them do so on a voluntary basis. The overwhelming majority of these “wonderful people” have been women. As I said earlier, outside of writing and illustrating, few men seem to want to be involved with picture books. So let me make this clear — if one demographic group is chiefly to blame for the state of affairs I’ve outlined, it is adult men, for failing to take sufficient interest in what young children are reading."

I’ve stressed this point repeatedly since I began addressing this issue and it’s the very first point I made in this recent summary of my campaign to gender balance the judging of the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals.

Some of the pieces I’ve read give the impression that I think that men ought to be running the picture book industry instead of women. On page 15 of COOL not CUTE I wrote this:

"I’d like to stress that I don’t believe that men are any more suited than women to these gatekeeper roles. If anything I think men are generally less suited, for reasons I’ve outlined in my separate article, NATURE and NURTURE. Individuals of both sexes inevitably bring some degree of subjectivity to their selection of reading material; it’s simply that male gatekeepers would generally bring a more boy-centred subjectivity."

And on page 13 of my NATURE and NURTURE essay I wrote the following:

"If the tables were turned and the UK picture book industry was dominated by men instead of women, I suspect that girls would be getting a far rawer deal than boys currently are."

2: My argument is about gender bias in PICTURE BOOK content - I'm NOT claiming that it also applies to children’s fiction or YA fiction

I believe that the failure of picture books to match the content appeal of children’s films, TV and video games is helping to drive many children of both sexes away from books and towards these other media at a very early age, but the boy-typical appeal of this missing content means that the effect is particularly pronounced in boys.

I don’t have a great deal of experience working with fiction for older children, but what experience I have had suggests that attitudes to content are relatively liberal in comparison to picture books. If anything, I think that fiction for older children and young adults can often contain edgier content than can be found in films and TV shows targeted at children of the same age. This edgier content appeals to many (not all) children and helps to keep them engaged with books. However for many children the reading habit is being broken long before they get to fiction, which Is why we need to start matching the content appeal of children’s films, TV from picture book age.

3: I'm NOT claiming that “girls and boys don’t have overlapping interests”

Here’s what I wrote at the beginning of Part 2 of my COOL not CUTE essay.

"This second part of this article highlights several ingredients that typically appeal to boys, which in my experience are commonly diluted or excluded from picture books. 

The word “typically” is important. As I mentioned at the end of Part 1 of this article, I’m making a generalised argument. I recognise there will be girls who find all the ingredients I’ve listed very appealing and there will be boys who find none of them appealing."

4: I'm NOT citing a study that shows 95% of children's books are bought by women

This statement was made at the top of a Daily Mail article, with which I had no direct involvement, and was picked up and repeated elsewhere. The Mail article appears to have been based on the early editions version of the Times article. I was told about The Times article as it went to press and, having read the text (without the provocative headline), requested a number of changes, most of which were incorporated into the later London editions and the online version.

Here’s what I wrote on page 9 of COOL not CUTE*

"A recent US survey revealed that 70% of all children’s books are bought by female customers. I haven’t been able to obtain a figure for the UK market, but I suspect it is similar. I also suspect that if you looked at picture book sales separately, the percentage would be significantly higher. When I suggested a figure of 90 to 95% to one publisher, they confirmed that this was in line with their in-house market research, which also showed that most of these customers were mothers or grandmothers."

One of the changes I requested for The Times article was that the 90 to 95%* figure be clearly presented as MY estimate.

This estimate applies to PICTURE BOOKS ONLY and NOT, as the Mail article suggests, ALL children’s books.

BALANCED COVERAGE?
In addition to an article dismissing my call for more gender balance in children’s publishing, last week’s
Bookseller Bulletin contained another article calling for more gender balance in adult publishing

The blog post that started all the fuss posed the question “Should gender balancing the books be for adults only?” None of the commentators attacking my views (or their imagined versions of my views) have attempted to answer this question. Many have argued that gender is entirely irrelevant to reading preferences. I suspect that few of these commentators would be happy to see the same "gender is irrelevant" argument used to justify the dominance of men in adult book reviewing. If gender is truly irrelevant to reading tastes, then surely it does not matter if men dominate the world of adult literature?

I think it does matter – and gender balance should matter for children’s literature too.

---

* UPDATE October 2015:  I've now replaced this 90-95% estimate in the essay with a specific figure, 84% female, from a 2013 Bowker report for the UK, US and Canadian children's book market.

Should gender balancing the books be for adults only?

Last year VIDA, an American organisation for women in the literary arts, published an analysis that revealed a conspicuous lack of gender balance in book reviewing, prompting The Guardian to observe that “male authors and reviewers continue to take a disproportionate slice of the literary pie”. Most of the publications covered in the VIDA analysis were American periodicals, but The Guardian published its own gender balance analysis of UK publications including national newspapers, counting up the numbers of male and female reviewers and authors under review in March 2013. The analysis revealed a relatively small imbalance in fiction (50% of reviewers and 46% of authors were women) but a strong male bias in non-fiction, with only 29% of reviewers and 36% of authors being female. The conclusion was that “the UK book world still suffers from a sharp divide along gender lines” and the consensus seemed to be that newspapers and literary journals must try harder to gender balance their book reviewing.

The Guardian’s analysis focused on the reviewing of books for adults but, as a children’s author interested in gender bias, I was curious to know about the gender balance of UK children’s book reviewing. So I conducted my own analysis of the children’s books reviewed by five UK national newspapers in 2013. I only counted regular reviews of newly published books in the book sections of the print editions of each newspaper. So blog-only reviews (including reader reviews), author interviews, lists of 10 best genre books and reading advice in The Guardian’s “Book Doctor” and The Telegraph’s “Ask Lorna” were not included. Picture books were counted as being half-authored by both author and illustrator and the reviews from the Sunday editions were included in the overall count for each paper. A spreadsheet containing all the data can be found at the bottom of this post.

There’s a pronounced imbalance among reviewers, with less than a fifth of picture books and less than a third of children’s fiction being reviewed by men

The analysis is divided into children’s picture books and children’s and teen fiction and encompasses 462 book reviews. It reveals another strong gender bias — only in this instance in the opposite direction, with the majority of reviews and the majority of books being selected for review being written by women. The imbalance is less marked among authors; 47% of the picture books and 41% of the children’s fiction reviewed was by male authors. However there’s a pronounced imbalance among reviewers, with less than a fifth of picture books and less than a third of children’s fiction being reviewed by men.

Click to see larger version

One of the justifications given for gender balancing adult book reviews is that reviewers tend to review books that are written by their own sex. This tendency is evident in the female reviewers in this sample. The bias is marginal for picture books — 49% of the picture books reviewed by female reviewers were by male authors and illustrators — but more pronounced for children’s fiction, with only 38% of fiction reviewed by female reviewers being written by male authors. This imbalance was quite conspicuous in some instances; in The Observer’s summer round-up of children’s books, only one of the twelve books recommended for older children and teens (by two female reviewers) was written by a man.

In The Observer’s summer round-up of children’s books, only one of the twelve books recommended for older children and teens (by two female reviewers) was written by a man.

However the tendency is reversed for male reviewers. The 14 male fiction reviewers in the sample reviewed marginally more books (51%) by female authors. And 60% of the picture books reviewed by The Independent’s Nicolas Tucker (the only man among the 13 picture book reviewers in the sample) were by female authors and illustrators.

The Guardian’s analysis of adult book reviews showed a strong pro-male bias in the reviewing of non-fiction books. Arguably another sign of pro-female bias in children’s book reviews is the scarcity of non-fiction. In the All-Party Parliamentary Boys’ Reading Commission report published by the National Literacy Trust in 2012, Phil Jarrett, National Adviser for English at Ofsted states that: “We know that boys tend to read different kinds of texts from girls — non-fiction, autobiographies, newspapers and so on — yet the English curriculum largely values certain kinds of narrative fiction texts”. It seems that most children’s books reviewers share these same values. While adult review sections can be equally split between fiction and non-fiction, only 2% (10 out of 472) of the newly published children’s books reviewed in this analysis were non-fiction. This is such a small sample it would be unwise to read too much into it, but 9 of these 10 reviews were written by female reviewers and there was an even split in the sexes of the authors and illustrators. 5 of the 10 non-fiction reviews came from The Guardian’s book section and special mention should also be made of GrrlScientist, The Guardian’s science blogger who posted 21 reviews of children’s non-fiction science books in the science section of The Guardian web site in 2013.

This scarcity of children’s non-fiction reviewing is exacerbating a decline in children’s non-fiction publishing that has been happening for some years. In 2012, children’s literature expert Caroline Horn claimed that, “publishers have cut back, partly because of people like Waterstones completely cutting back on non-fiction about six or seven years ago.” There is still a lot of brilliantly written and illustrated children’s non-fiction being published each year, but a parent of a child of either sex with a taste for non-fiction books is unlikely to find out about them by reading the children’s book reviews in the national newspapers.

Of course the dominance of women in children’s book reviewing reflects the fact that jobs that are associated with children, particularly very young children, have long been the preserve of women and many – if not most – men are currently quite happy to leave it that way. One justification that might be made for the lack of men among children’s book reviewers is that women are simply far more eager to review children’s books than men are. However a similar justification has long been given for the under-representation of women in adult book reviewing. Describing her time as a literary editor in the 1970s, Claire Tomalin recalled: "I tried very hard both at the New Statesman and the Sunday Times to find and use more women reviewers — but I also remember being attacked for not doing better. The truth is, there were many more men eager to review”. And in response to last year’s VIDA study The Guardian’s literary editor Claire Armitstead commented that: "We always try to keep an even balance but many more men offer themselves to review books than women, so we have to go out and find them.” I think it’s reasonable to suggest that literary editors might take a similarly proactive approach to gender balancing their children’s book reviews and go out and find a few men.

The lack of gender balance among children’s book reviewers isn’t difficult to recognise and anyone familiar with the world of children’s literature will be well aware of it. So why doesn’t it draw the same level of media coverage and righteous indignation as the lack of gender balance in adult book reviewing? I think there are three assumptions that explain this, all of which need challenging.

Surely we ought to be applying as much care and attention to the reviewing of books for children as we do to the reviewing of books for adults.

The first assumption is that children’s literature is less important than adult literature, so the manner in which it is reviewed warrants less care and attention. Is this really true? Children’s books, and picture books in particular, are where we take our first faltering steps into the world of literature. First impressions are important and unappealing children’s books can give children the impression that all books are unappealing. The books we read as children, when we’re still developing an understanding of the world, can be hugely instrumental in shaping that understanding. Surely we ought to be applying as much care and attention to the reviewing of books for children as we do to the reviewing of books for adults.

The second assumption is that gender is entirely irrelevant to reading tastes, so it does not matter if one sex is disproportionally represented among reviewers. I doubt that many people would take this same argument seriously if it were used to justify the disproportionate number of men in the world of adult book reviewing. All children are different and reading tastes can’t be neatly separated according to gender but, whether through nature and nurture or nurture alone, some tastes are clearly gender-typical.

The third assumption is that gender balance is less important when men are in the minority. It may seem inappropriate to be highlighting the under-representation of men in a society in which the under-representation of women is a far, far greater problem. However equality ought to work both ways and I believe that the lack of gender balance in the world of children’s books is a key factor underlying the growing gender gap in children’s literacy. Boys do not find books as appealing as girls currently do and this is reflected in the fact that boys’ average reading abilities are lagging behind that of girls by the equivalent of one year's schooling. The growing gender gap in literacy is linked to the growing gender gap in academic achievement as a whole; the number of girls applying for university in 2014 was more than a third larger than the number of boys.

I’m a picture book author and evidence shows that the literacy gender gap takes root at picture book age. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is the same age at which female reviewers are most dominant. While the gender balance of picture book authors and illustrators matches that of the intended readership (roughly 50:50 male:female) the chain of gatekeepers that link these two groups is far from gender-balanced. In this 2013 sample, female picture book reviewers outnumbered males by a ratio of 12:1. Similarly overwhelming female to male ratios can be found among picture book publishers, infant teachers, children’s librarians and, perhaps most significantly, picture book buyers, the majority of whom are adult women. Whether a picture book is being accepted for publication, selected for use in a school or library, purchased in a bookshop or recommended in a newspaper, the people judging its appeal are overwhelmingly female.

Whether a picture book is being accepted for publication, selected for use in a school or library, purchased in a bookshop or recommended in a newspaper, the people judging its appeal are overwhelmingly female

For this reason the relatively even gender split of authors and illustrators in the analysis should not be taken as showing that the range of picture books reviewed will appeal equally to both sexes. As a male author, I’ve learnt to write for a market that is dominated by female gatekeepers. Even picture books about pirates, dinosaurs, aliens or vehicles that might be characterised as having boy-typical appeal, partially reflect the tastes of the mother or grandmother that will usually be purchasing them. As a consequence, elements such as combat, technology, peril and villainy are often toned down or omitted altogether. A lot of content that’s commonly found in children’s TV, films and video games watched or played by 4-6 year olds is often deemed unappealing or inappropriate for picture books. This rejected content appeals to children of both sexes but it’s particularly appealing to boys and I think this is one reason many boys reject books in favour of these other media. I still love writing picture books and feel privileged to be able to make a living doing it – I just wish that the stories I’m able to get published could respond to boy-typical tastes as uncompromisingly as they do to girl-typical tastes. And it’s not just boys that are missing out; there are plenty of girls with boy-typical tastes who would enjoy reading these stories too.

Studies have shown that male protagonists outnumber female protagonists in picture books by a ratio of 2:1 and this is clearly an issue that needs addressing. This imbalance could be taken as demonstrating a pro-male bias across the picture book industry as a whole, similar to the pro-male bias evident in the male-dominated Hollywood film industry. However anyone familiar with the demographics of the UK picture book industry ought to appreciate that the situation is more complex than that. It’s overwhelmingly female publishers that are choosing to publish more books with male protagonists and overwhelmingly female picture book buyers that are choosing to purchase them.

Gender balancing children’s book reviewing would not require existing women reviewers being replaced by men. The most appropriate way for books editors to even out the numbers is to supplement their existing children’s team with additional reviewers. On her final day as Children’s Laureate in 2013, Julia Donaldson highlighted the fact that while children’s books account for a quarter of all UK book sales, less than a fortieth of the review space in UK newspapers is dedicated to them and contrasted this situation with Germany and the US where children’s literature is given far more attention. We excel at writing and illustrating children’s books in this country, so let’s get a few more men in to bolster the ranks of children’s reviewers and help highlight what’s best in children’s literature. And let’s start giving the best of our children’s non-fiction books the attention they deserve as well.

The data from the analysis is available in both MS Excel and PDF format below. If you spot any errors in the data, let me know and I will endeavour to correct them.

MS Excel spreadsheet  •  PDF document

Another all-female Carnegie Greenaway judging panel – but I’ve decided to draw a line under my gender-balance campaign.

I noticed last week that the “Meet the Judges” page of the Carnegie Greenaway site had been updated to show this year’s judging panel. As was the case in 2013, there are no men among the 13 judges.

This wasn't a surprise as the organisers had told me this would be the case last November (the judges having already been selected). Nevertheless, having spent the last year trying to persuade the Youth Libraries Group to adopt a gender-balanced panel, I’m obviously disappointed with this outcome. I’d like to stress again that I don’t question the suitability of any of the individual judges – I am simply questioning the appropriateness of a single-sex judging panel for awards given to books for children of both sexes.

The gender balance of the Carnegie Greenaway and the Man Booker judging panels for the last decade.
Click the image to see a larger version.

I had said at the end of my last post that I intended to keep pressing the case, but having reflected on it for a couple of weeks, I’ve now decided not to.

I’m still convinced that, given the gender gap in children's literacy, the UK’s most prestigious children’s literature awards ought to have a gender-balanced judging panel. However, the only people that can bring about this change are the YLG members who select the judges. Over the last few months I’ve been able to put the case for gender-balanced judging to YLG members through their newsletter. Having been granted a fair hearing, I accept that it’s now down to the members themselves to decide if they want to make a change. So I’m going to use this post to recap a few key points before drawing a line under my campaign for the foreseeable future.

Here are three things I knew when I started the campaign (but have been told repeatedly) and three things I’ve learnt over the course of the last year.

Three things I knew when I started

1: MEN ARE TO BLAME!

At the end of my COOL not CUTE essay about the wider gender-bias in the world of picture books, I concluded that if one demographic group was to blame for this bias, “it is adult men, for failing to take sufficient interest in what young children are reading.” I recognise that the lack of men on the Carnegie Greenaway panel reflects the lack of men among the YLG membership. However I think there is little chance that this imbalance will change unless men that are willing to join the panel are actively encouraged to do so. My suggestion that the regions select judges on an alternating male/female basis is not that different from the approach that the Labour Party now uses to encourage its local parties to select female parliamentary candidates.

2: Even if there is a gender balance problem in children’s books, the makeup of the Carnegie Greenaway panel would only represent a tiny part of it.

I set up this blog to highlight what I believe to be a female bias in the world of picture books. All-female Carnegie Greenaway panels are only a tiny part of this, but they’re emblematic of a wider gender-imbalance among all the gatekeeper groups that judge what's appealing and appropriate for young children to read. By highlighting the lack of gender-balance in two such prestigious awards I hoped to raise awareness of the wider issue. I’ve argued elsewhere for gender balance in other, more influential, gatekeeper groups, such as consumers, and will continue to do so.

3: The awards are judged in accordance with fixed criteria.

It’s been argued that the judging criteria of the Carnegie and Greenaway ensure that the awards are judged objectively. The Greenaway’s criteria relate to a picture book’s artistic and aesthetic qualities, its typography and how the text relates to the illustrations, while the Carnegie’s criteria relate to a novel’s plotting, characterisation and the effectiveness of its writing style. I accept that these criteria provide a focus for the judges’ deliberations, but each individual judge’s opinion of how well a book meets these criteria is still subjective. Indeed if the judges don’t have differing subjective opinions, then why are there thirteen of them? If one reason for having such a large panel is to reflect a wide range of views when making a judgement, then, at a time when children’s books appeal less to boys than girls, shouldn’t that range incorporate male views as much as female ones?

Three things I’ve learnt in the last year

1: The individual judges are selected by the YLG regions they represent and the awards organisers have no influence over their selection.

I initially wrote to the awards organisers to try to persuade them to take a gender-balanced approach to panel selection. However it has since been explained to me that the judges are selected by the YLG members in each of the regions they represent. Once selected, each judge serves two years and there is a rolling programme of changes so that each judging panel includes a mix of year 1 and year 2 judges.

2: There is a gender balance issue with picture book protagonists.

In her response to my YLG newsletter article, awards organiser Joy Court refers to Liza Miller’s MA dissertation “Society and Commercialism: Core Factors in Picture Book Sex Stereotyping” which reveals that male protagonists outnumber female protagonists in Greenaway-winning picture books by a ratio of 2:1. This imbalance could be interpreted as demonstrating a bias towards male protagonists among Greenaway judges, however Miller’s dissertation suggests that it’s a reflection of a bias in the output of the picture book industry as a whole. While the under-representation of female characters is clearly an issue that needs addressing, I don’t think a bias towards male protagonists can be taken to demonstrate a pro-male bias across picture book content as a whole.

3: There are other, equally important, inclusivity issues that should be considered in the judging of children’s book awards.

Liza Miller’s dissertation touches briefly on racial representation, stating that “not a single Asian or African character has ever featured in a Kate Greenaway-winning picture book.” Again, it should be stressed that this under-representation reflects the output of the picture book industry as a whole. Having said which, there has only been one non-white judge on the Carnegie Greenaway panel in the last eight years*. I have tried to make the case for wider inclusivity in the judging of children’s book awards in this blog post.


The Greenaway and Carnegie have always made an invaluable contribution to raising the profile of children’s books and promoting children’s literacy for both sexes. If only one YLG region decides to take gender balance and wider inclusivity into account when selecting their judges, it will help make these two great awards even greater.

*Judging by the photographs of each year's judges on the Carnegie Greenaway web site. I was only able to obtain complete sets of photographs from 2007 onwards.

Read all the posts on gender-balancing the judging of the Carnegie Greenaway