Why we have to start valuing science over sexual politics if we want to tackle the literacy gender gap

Science, not sexual politics, holds the answer to closing the literacy gender gap.

The rise in the number of children reading for pleasure, revealed in the annual Children's and Young People's Reading report earlier this year, is clearly a cause for celebration. However, as The Bookseller noted, the increase relates solely to girls; the number of boys who said that they enjoyed reading remained static, resulting in a widening of the existing gender gap. The report states that "61.6% of girls enjoy reading either very much or quite a lot compared with 47.2% of boys. Conversely, nearly twice as many boys as girls say that they don’t enjoy reading at all (12.8% vs. 7.3%)."

Studies show that reading for pleasure is closely linked to wider academic achievement and a similar gender gap is seen in children's GCSE results (measured using the standard criteria of percentage of students achieving 5 A*-C grades). This is not a new phenomenon, boys have been underachieving in UK schools for over a generation. While sixteen-year-old boys were outperforming sixteen-year-old girls in the 1950s, by the end of the 1960s this gap had closed and in the early 1980s it began to open up in the opposite direction with girls outperforming boys (see graph below). Between 1988 and 1995 the gap increased rapidly and for the last two decades it has remained between 7% and 9%. Last year it reached an 11-year high of 8.8%, this year it stands at 8.4%.

Gender Gap in O Level and GCSE results 1962-2006
From Gender and Education: the evidence on pupils in England 2007

While cases such as Malala Yousafzai's highlight the severe educational inequalities still faced by girls in undeveloped countries such as Pakistan, the widely held perception that girls generally receive a second-rate education in comparison to boys is several decades out of date. In a New York Times article earlier this year psychologist Gijsbert Stoet, who studies educational inequality at Glasgow University, commented that “the message you get is that girls around the world don’t get a chance in education, but that is not true for most of the world.” Stoet’s claim is backed up by PISA research which shows that on average, 15-year-old boys score worse than 15-year-old girls across combined achievements in mathematics, reading and science in 70% of PISA tested countries.

"Many people take a partizan, pro-female approach to gender equality. For such people, being pro-boy is often equated with being anti-girl"

The New York Times article quotes Doctor Stoet as being surprised by “the lack of eagerness to solve the problems that boys face.” I think this lack of eagerness is rooted in sexual politics. As I commented in my last post, many people take a partizan, pro-female approach to gender equality. For such people, being pro-boy is often equated with being anti-girl and attempting to tackle inequalities that favour women over men is regarded as inappropriate while there are still so many inequalities that favour men over women. For those with a less partizan approach to equality, this is a false dichotomy; inequality should be tackled wherever it occurs, no matter which group it disadvantages. It's not a zero-sum game; we can and should be both pro-girl and pro-boy.

Another current aspect of sexual politics that discourages many from tackling boys' underachievement is the widespread belief that gender (as opposed to sex) is entirely the product of nurture, with nature playing no significant role. There are many subscribers to this fundamentalist nurture-only view in the world of children’s literature and literacy and some of them are very vocal in their views. Attempts to address the literacy gender gap by responding to boy-typical preferences are condemned by nurture-only fundamentalists on the grounds that acknowledging such preferences reinforces sexual stereotypes. A nurture-only interpretation of gender is also used to dismiss the need for gender-balance among the female-dominated gatekeeper groups in children’s literature (publishers, librarians, reviewers, awards judges, teachers and book-buyers). The argument goes something like this: It doesn't matter if it’s overwhelmingly one sex determining what's suitable and appealing in children’s literature — if we raise both sexes in the same way, they'll develop the same tastes. Then they’ll find the same books equally appealing and the literacy gender gap will disappear. Anyone advocating a gender-sensitive approach to tackling the literacy gap is publicly denounced as a sexist (I speak from experience here). So it’s little wonder that few are eager to propose or pursue such solutions.

"Taking a 'gender-sensitive approach' does NOT mean gender branding"

I should stress that taking a "gender-sensitive approach" does NOT mean gender branding. There is good evidence to suggest that gender is not binary and everyday experience tells us that an individual child’s behaviour and preferences are not simply dictated by whether or not they possess a Y chromosome. This is one reason why gender-branded books are a bad idea. However there is also good evidence to suggest that biological factors play an important role in determining the sex-typical behaviour evident in the population as a whole.  A gender-sensitive response does not require young readers to be pigeon-holed according to their sex; publishers can still produce books that accurately reflect boy-typical reading preferences without deterring potential female readers by marketing these books as being “for boys”.

There is now a large body of scientific evidence suggesting that prenatal hormone levels play an important role in determining sex-typical behaviour and preferences. Studies show that children of both sexes who are subjected to high levels of testosterone in the uterus are more likely to be boy-typical in their play preferences. However, high prenatal testosterone levels are far more common in boys, which is one reason that such play preferences are 'boy-typical'. Nurture also plays an important role in determining play preferences – other studies show that parents are far more likely to encourage a girl to play with a doll than a truck – but the consensus within the scientific community is that children’s play preferences are determined by BOTH nature and nurture.

One of the studies that’s helped to identify the role prenatal hormones play in determining sex-typical preferences is the Cambridge Child Development Study conducted by the Neuroscience Centre at Cambridge University. The prenatal testosterone levels of 235 Cambridgeshire children were measured via amniocentesis and the children’s development monitored at regular intervals as the children grew older. The study has been running for over a decade and the children have now grown into teenagers. The results suggest that prenatal testosterone levels are related to a number of sex-typical behavioural characteristics including children’s play preferences. One example is the boy-typical preference for playing with machines and vehicles. Although the study has not collected any data directly relating to media preferences, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that a child who has a preference for playing with machines or vehicles will probably have a similar preference for reading books or watching TV shows about machines or vehicles as well.

"Only about 15% of the public accept that brain gender is a product of both nature and nurture"

Arguably the UK’s leading authorities on gender development are Melissa Hines, Director of Cambridge University’s Hormones and Behaviour Research Lab and Simon Baron-Cohen, the Director of Cambridge's Autism Research Centre. You can watch Professors Hines and Baron-Cohen outline some of the evidence relating to children’s play preferences at a panel event in the video below. The event was organised by the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation committed to promoting the public understanding of science, and brain gender is certainly an area that would benefit hugely from better public understanding. Towards the end of the discussion Professor Hines mentions that only about 15% of the public accept the that brain gender is a product of both nature and nurture, with the majority subscribing to either a nurture-only or nature-only view.

One commonly cited sex difference in children’s reading preferences is that boys are generally more interested in non-fiction than girls are. Professor Keith Topping, author of the 2015 What Kids Are Reading report, which analysed the reading habits of over half a million UK schoolchildren, has said that the scarcity of non-fiction books in UK schools “could be disadvantaging boys at the expense of girls” and the report suggests that this scarcity might reflect a preference for fiction over non-fiction among primary school teachers, who are predominantly female. My own survey of children’s book reviews published in national newspapers in 2013 showed a similar imbalance, with fiction outnumbering non-fiction reviews by a staggering 46:1 ratio. The survey also showed that, like primary school teachers, the reviewers selecting the books were predominantly female.

I believe this particular sex difference is not so much to do with fiction versus non fiction as narrative versus non-narrative content. I think most girls will readily read non-fiction content presented in a narrative form (e.g. a biographical novel) and most boys will readily read fictional content presented in a non-narrative form (e.g. a book of cross sections of Star Wars vehicles).

"The female-typical preference for narrative is currently being exploited to encourage more girls to study STEM subjects"

The female-typical preference for narrative is currently being exploited to encourage more girls to study STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The introduction of more storytelling into science in the form of fiction or biography has proved to be an effective tool in engaging girls in these traditionally male-dominated fields. It’s now recognised that, while a straightforward outlining of facts and theory in STEM subjects may work well for boys, girls generally respond better to a narrative approach. So stories that illustrate how individual people are responsible for or benefit from STEM are helping to make STEM subjects seem more relevant and appealing to girls.

It could be argued that by openly acknowledging a female-typical preference for storytelling, STEM educators are reinforcing a sexual stereotype. However even the most fervent nurture-only-fundamentalists seem reluctant to voice such arguments. I suspect that the reason they're willing to turn a blind eye is that, in this instance, they recognise that exploiting a sex-typical preference is an effective way to close the STEM gender gap and counter the stereotype that science is for boys more than girls.

If we want to close the literacy gender gap and counter the stereotype that reading is for girls more than boys, we need to follow STEM’s example. We need to be more responsive to sex-typical preferences. We need to be more proactive about getting male gatekeepers into all areas of children’s literature. We need to start valuing science over sexual politics. And we need to stop shouting “SEXIST!” every time someone suggests that, ON AVERAGE, different sexes might have different preferences.

Is a 'one way' attitude to gender balance hampering efforts to get boys reading?

Gender equality should not be a one way street

I’m aware that some people regard some of the arguments I’ve made on this blog as being anti-feminist. It’s a view I first addressed on this blog back in 2013 in relation to the belief that acknowledging innate sex differences in behaviour was anti-feminist.

The actor Emma Watson recently commented that, "If you stand for equality, then you’re a feminist." Whether you accept this or not comes down to how you define feminism. My dictionary defines it as “the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.” I support the equality of the sexes and recognise that in most contexts this means promoting women’s rights. Nevertheless, when I’m asked if I’m a feminist, I feel obliged to qualify my answer by saying that I’m an egalitarian feminist, because I think the principal of equality should override the principal of promoting women’s rights. Over last couple of years I’ve come up against several self-professed “feminists” who seem to interpret feminism as simply meaning promoting women’s rights regardless of the context. This group could be characterised as partisan feminists. When the actor and veteran human rights campaigner Susan Sarandon objected to being described as a feminist on the basis that it was an “old-fashioned”, “alienating” word, I suspect that she had this narrower, partisan interpretation of feminism in mind.

While a pro-female approach to gender equality is clearly appropriate for most contexts, I think children’s literature is one context where we need to recognise that we have to redress the balance in the opposite direction if we want children’s books to appeal equally to both sexes. Gender equality should not be a one way street!

Publishing journalist and Associate Editor of The Bookseller Porter Anderson agrees. Addressing the lack of gender balance in the recent shortlists for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in a Thought Catalog article earlier this year, he wrote:

What if the gender imbalance in the Waterstones shortlist released today gave us 15 books by men and only three by women? 

Would we hear any concerns voiced then? Well, of course we would. And rightly so. 

"What if we have confused the need for “gender balance” in our books culture with support for women over men?" Porter Anderson

Several points are important in the dialog that’s building in urgency among thoughtful, earnest members of the readership and of the publishing community about the trend highlighted by the Waterstones shortlist. 

In a nutshell, it’s this: What if we have confused the need for “gender balance” in our books culture with support for women over men?

“Balance,” after all, means balance. And while we might never achieve perfect equilibrium in almost any aspect of life or work, there seems to be a line of thinking in parts of the publishing industry today that interprets “balance” to mean support and applause for women and girls.

Anderson goes on to say this about the current children’s literature buzzword “diversity”:

Even the term “diversity” itself, when it comes to gender issues, tends to be confused with an automatic reference to female advancement. These terms are so readily weighted, often without our thinking about it. However much I and many others despise the stupid oppression of women by men for such an unspeakably large part of history, can moving forward by creating the opposing imbalance possibly be the answer? Of course not. 

Effects such as those seen in the Waterstones shortlist need not be “somebody’s fault.” Blame is not an issue here. I don’t think that anyone gets up in the morning in books publishing today and says to him or herself, “Here goes another great day of suppressing books by and for guys and promoting books by and for women.” 

But however unintended such constructs may be, their outcomes may be exacerbating a serious and deepening challenge: our men and boys aren’t reading as much as our women and girls.

As I've highlighted elsewhere, this gender imbalance extends well beyond children’s publishers and booksellers into other important gatekeeper groups such as teachers and children’s librarians. Mary Curnock Cook, chief of UCAS the UK Universities admissions service, has suggested that the lack of male teachers may be a result of a one way attitude to gender balance in the UK education system. Her views were quoted in an article in Times Higher Education last year:

Action over gender imbalances at university was “about women who are disadvantaged compared with men”, she said. “Why wouldn’t you set out to make it more socially acceptable for young men to go into nursing and teaching?” she asked. 

"I don’t see anything happening in education policy to tackle this issue." Mary Curnock Cook

“Maybe some of the issues we’ve got with male education would be improved by having more male primary and secondary teachers,” Ms Curnock Cook said. She added that boys being taught English literature in classes with a majority of girls and by female teachers “doesn’t always make for young men who love English literature”. “I don’t see anything happening in education policy to tackle this issue,” she said 

She made the broader point that there was a now a “huge sociological and widening participation issue” because women were so much more likely to apply to higher education than men.

When I set up this blog, I’d anticipated that some people would object to some of the solutions I’d suggested for addressing the lack of gender balance among publishers, teachers, librarians and picture-book-buyers. I hadn’t anticipated that quite so many people would reject the premise that this lack of gender balance was an issue that was worth addressing. I think this is a partisan response and I suspect that those same people would react very differently if women rather than men were being underrepresented.

Unless we’re prepared to recognise that gender balance ought to be as important to children’s literature as it is to areas such as science and engineering, we have little hope of closing the literacy gender gap. We have to start being proactive about engaging men in children’s literature in the same way that we are already proactive about engaging women in science and engineering. Sitting back and claiming that 'we have to accept that they’re just not as interested as the other sex are' is no excuse. We have to go out of our way to get them interested! 

James Daunt's response to my open letter on gender balancing the Waterstones Children's Book Prize

Here is James Daunt's response to the open letter I sent earlier this week regarding gender balancing the Waterstones Children's Book Prize.

I think the first paragraph may have been a result of a misunderstanding. I was not suggesting that there should be an equal number of male and female authors and illustrators on future shortlists. I was suggesting that future shortlisting/judging should be done by a reasonably gender-balanced group of booksellers. I clarified this to Mr Daunt in a subsequent email.

Dear Mr Emmett 

I agree with the general argument you make but not with the conclusion. The prize should go to the best books irrespective of the gender of the author: in short, I do not believe there should be gender-balanced shortlisting. The prize is aimed at celebrating new and relatively unknown authors which reinforces a central commitment to intrinsic quality. 

The question for us then is whether the judging is fair or is, as you intimate, skewed in favour of female authors. Certainly I have believed it to be fair. We have a longlist from which the shortlist is decided and, having been personally involved in the reading and discussion of these, detected no bias in the judging. 

You are right to suspect that there is a strong female bias to the Waterstones children’s bookselling cohort, as there is also in senior and editorial positions within children’s publishing. At the most senior level within Waterstones we are alive to the importance of encouraging boys to read and generally I think this is appreciated at the shop level. The Book Prize is an important promotion but sits within a schedule of equally visible promotions within our shops. Many are within the control of the individual shops, but there are also centrally dictated offers such as a Book of the Month. Overall, we try to promote a fair proportion of books at boys 

Your letter is interesting and provoking, and I will bear it strongly in mind not only when we come to the prize again next year, but also in how we run promotions in the meantime. It is, as you argue, important. 

With kind regards 

James

I am grateful to Mr Daunt for taking the time to address my argument. However, he has since made it clear that he is currently not willing to commit to any change in how the prize is run.

I still maintain that gender-balanced judgement is every bit as appropriate to children's literature as it is to adult literature, regardless of which sex is predominant, and will continue to campaign for it.

Gender balancing the Waterstones Children's Book Prize: An open letter to James Daunt

Should the scarcity of men on Waterstones Children’s Book Prize shortlists be a cause for concern?

Following on from my comments last month about the conspicuous lack of gender balance in recent Waterstones Children Book Prize shortlists, I thought it was worth trying to encourage Waterstones to give some consideration to gender balance in the shortlisting and judging of future prizes. So I’ve written the following open letter to Waterstones CEO, James Daunt.

Clarification: In case it's not clear in the letter, I'm NOT suggesting that there should be an equal number of male and female authors and illustrators on future shortlists. I am suggesting that future shortlisting/judging should be done by a reasonably gender-balanced group of booksellers.

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Dear Mr Daunt

As a children’s author, I’d like to applaud Waterstones for helping to raise the profile of children’s literature through the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. When the shortlist for the 2015 prize was announced last month you said that, “children are our most valued customers here at Waterstones as we strive to nurture the next generation of readers.” I’m sure that the prize is helping to achieve this goal. However I’d like to suggest one way in which it might do this more effectively in years to come.

You’re no doubt aware of the current gender gap in children’s reading abilities. The 2012 OECD Council report on gender equality in education, states that in reading skills “boys lag behind girls at the end of compulsory education to the equivalent of a year’s schooling, on average, and are far less likely to spend time reading for pleasure.” It’s not a problem in every school, but 76% of the UK schools surveyed for The National Literacy Trust’s 2012 Boys’ Reading Commission Report, reported that “boys in their school did not do as well in reading as girls”.

Generally speaking, children’s literature currently appeals more to girls than boys. A similar sex difference in preferences for other children’s media, such as film or TV, might not be worth addressing, but children’s literature goes hand in hand with children’s literacy, an essential life skill. The gender gap in children’s literacy is linked to the gender gap in academic achievement as a whole. UCAS chief Mary Curnock Cook has warned of a “disquieting” gap between men and women going to university, which is continuing to widen. This year, the number of girls applying to universities in England is more than a third higher than the number of boys.

Given this problem, I’d like to suggest that you address what appears to be a pro-female gender-skew in the shortlisting and judging of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.

Click image to see a larger version

Since the prize was set up in 2005, shortlisted female authors and illustrators have outnumbered males every year except 2007. This tendency has become particularly pronounced in recent years with only 3 men among the 19 authors and illustrators on both the 2014 and 2015 shortlists. While I don’t doubt that every one of these authors and illustrators created books that thoroughly deserved shortlisting, I do doubt that such a gender-skewed shortlist is the best way of nurturing a love of reading in both sexes.

Obviously the gender of a book’s author or illustrator does not directly equate to the gender of a reader that might find that book appealing. There are plenty of children’s authors and illustrators whose work appeals equally to both sexes: Dahl, Donaldson, Rowling and Pullman to name but a few. However the gender analysis published by Goodreads last November based on the data from 40,000 of Goodreads’ most active readers (20,000 readers of each sex) shows that both male and female readers have a strong preference for books written by authors of the same sex. 90% of the 50 most-read books by male readers were written by male authors, and an identical 90% of the 50 most-read books by female readers were written by female authors. Goodreads editor-in-chief Elizabeth Khuri Chandler has said that responses to the analysis suggest that “most people were unaware of the gender breakdown of the book they were reading” and that readers generally “don’t set out to read a male author or a female author. It’s all about the book.” If this is the case, then the analysis suggests, perhaps not surprisingly, that most authors are particularly good at writing literature that appeals to readers of the same sex.

I’m told that Waterstones has not responded to requests for a gender breakdown of the booksellers that compiled the 2015 shortlist. I don’t imagine that any of these booksellers were deliberately discriminating in favour of female authors and illustrators. Like the Khuri Chandler’s readers, I’m sure that their choices were “all about the book”, but if the Goodreads analysis is anything to go by, I’d guess that these booksellers were predominantly female.

The 2015 What Kids Are Reading report, published last month, analyses the reading habits of over half a million children in over 2,700 UK schools. Professor Keith Topping, the report’s author, suggests that the reading preferences of teachers and librarians could be influencing the book choices children are given in school. The report’s website notes that “worryingly, this trend could be disadvantaging boys at the expense of girls.” I think it’s reasonable to suggest that a lack of gender balance among the booksellers selecting the prize’s shortlists might result in a similar lack of gender balance in the shortlists’ appeal.

A strong predilection for same-sex reading could be seen as a problem that needs addressing. The current Waterstones Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman commented recently that “reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while,” and argued that certain books should not be written for certain people, “they should be read by everybody." This is a compelling argument for encouraging boys to read more books by female authors. However, given that female readers show an identical predilection for same-sex reading, shouldn’t we be encouraging girls to read more books by male authors as well? And, if that’s the case, shouldn’t the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize be highlighting the best of those male-authored books?

One justification that I’ve been given for the lack of gender balance in the prize’s shortlists is that there are relatively few men writing or illustrating children’s books. I know from my own experience of almost 20 years working in children’s picture book publishing that there are plenty of men writing and illustrating picture books, and about half of the fiction my wife and I read to our son and daughter at bedtimes was also written by male authors. I’m not so familiar with the demographics of the teen market, but have been told by several people, including The Bookseller’s Charlotte Eyre, that there are “lots of men” writing for this age range too. Despite this, there have been no male authors shortlisted in the Teen category for the last two years and only two male authors have been shortlisted in the four years since the category was established.

Another justification I’ve been offered for the lack of shortlisted men is that most of the best children’s books have been written by women in recent years. This echoes the most of the best films have been made my men claim that’s sometimes used to justify the lack of female directors and screenwriters shortlisted for the Academy Awards. The Academy has acknowledged that the lack of female nominees reflects the lack of women among its members (who select the shortlist) and their president Cheryl Boone Isaacs has said that the Academy is committed to addressing this.

A third argument I’ve heard is that, after centuries of pro-male bias, we ought to welcome instances like this where the tables have been turned. I’ve heard this same argument used to dismiss the need to address the gender gap in literacy and wider academic achievement. The problem with this argument is that it treats children as members of two competing gender tribes, rather than individuals. Children don’t choose their gender and have had no part in making the world they’re born into. So, regardless of whether they are a girl or a boy, they should be offered the same advantages and opportunities. While we should do all we can to discourage our sons from perpetuating the pro-male inequalities of the past, they should not be expected to contend with pro-female inequalities in reparation. We should be striving to offer equality across the board as a birthright to both sexes.

Mr Daunt, I hope that I’ve convinced you that gender-balancing both the shortlisting and judging of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize would be a great way of making your admirable award even more commendable. Gender balanced shortlisting and judging panels are already commonplace among grown-up book awards such as the Man Booker, which has produced an equal number of male and female winning authors since the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize began in 2005.

If Waterstones wants to give equal encouragement to young readers of both sexes, doesn’t it make sense for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize to give equal encouragement and recognition to writers and illustrators of both sexes as well?

Yours sincerely

Jonathan Emmett
Children’s Author

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UPDATE: I received a response from James Daunt which you can read here.

What Kids Are Reading Report 2015

The 2015 What Kids Are Reading Report
acknowledges a possible gender-bias in the
selection of children's books available in UK schools.

Following on from the comments of literacy consultant Sarah Threlkeld-Brown and editor Alison Sage quoted in my post earlier this month, I’m heartened to see that a growing number of people are prepared to acknowledge that there may be a pro-female gender-bias in the world of children’s literature that is influencing the literacy gender gap.

The 2015 What Kids Are Reading report, published this morning, analyses the reading habits of over half a million children in over 2,700 UK schools. Here’s a quote from the report’s website that’s in keeping with my own comments in the “School” and “Library” sections of my COOL not CUTE essay.

Professor Keith Topping, who wrote the What Kids Are Reading report, suggests that the reading preferences of teachers and librarians could be influencing the book choices children make. Worryingly, this trend could be disadvantaging boys at the expense of girls.

And from the report itself:

Page 16

It will not have escaped the reader’s attention that almost all the books in these lists are fiction – storybooks. Children like fiction, but they also like non-fiction. We know that boys in particular are interested in non-fiction. So why is it that so many fiction books are chosen? Is it something to do with the reading preferences of school teachers and librarians, who might tend to encourage pupils to read fiction but not non-fiction? This is likely to result in higher performance by girls, who are known to favour fiction. Is this a gendered preference, so that the predominantly female primary school teachers and the half of secondary school teachers who are female prefer fiction and are unconsciously promoting fiction at the expense of non-fiction and disadvantaging boys?

Page 26

Teachers should be aware of the very different student preferences for reading over time and the marked differences in preferences in secondary between boys and girls (although not necessarily encouraging them!).

The report includes statistics on the most read and most loved books (the two aren’t necessarily the same) and a “Most Popular Authors” chart can be found here. Following on from my comments about the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in an earlier post, the chart shows that, while male children's authors may be increasingly out of favour with the booksellers that select the Waterstones shortlists, they are currently very popular with children of both sexes, with 7 of the 10 most popular children’s authors being male.

COOL not CUTE – revised and updated!

UPDATE: This post has been updated with the following new content:

October 2015: "Picture Book Consumers" section added

This site has now been online for two years, during which time I’ve had a lot of feedback both supportive and critical. While some of this feedback is reflected in my blog posts, I thought it should also be reflected in the COOL not CUTE essay at the top of this blog, so I’ve now updated and revised this.

Here’s an outline of the significant changes:

The subtitle

The essay’s original subtitle was “What boys really want from picture books.” All children are different and in the original version of the essay I acknowledged that some boys might find none of the boy-friendly ingredients I’d identified appealing and that “What many boys really want from picture books” might have been a better subtitle. The essay also acknowledged that, while these ingredients might typically appeal more to boys, there would also be some girls that found them equally appealing – so “What many boys and some girls really want from picture books” might have been even more appropriate.

The site/essay's subtitle has been changed to something a little less reductive.

While I had taken care to make these qualifications in the essay itself, I now recognise that the subtitle gave some readers a simplistic impression of my argument that may have deterred them from examining it any further. So I’ve now changed the subtitle to one that, while far less snappy, will hopefully be less off-putting to such readers.

Picture Book Consumers

In the original essay I’d estimated the gender balance of picture book consumers based on data for the US children's book market (including books for older children). I've now repalced this estimate with specific figures (84% female 16% male) from a 2013 Bowker report on the UK, US and Canadian children's book market.

Children’s Book Awards

In the original essay I’d suggested that the organisers of the Carnegie and Greenaway Book Awards might consider adopting a gender-balanced judging panel for future awards. I subsequently campaigned for such a change but was unable to convince the Youth Libraries Group that runs the awards that gender-balance judging was either practical or worthwhile. So I’ve revised the relevant sections of the essay to reflect this.

Children’s Book Reviewing

In the original essay I mentioned the lack of gender-balance among children’s book reviewers and supported this with statistics taken from reviews of my own picture books. I’ve now replaced this with the results of a gender analysis of picture book reviews published in UK national newspapers in 2013, which I carried out subsequently.

A Male Protagonist

The original essay included “A male protagonist” in the list of “boy-friendly ingredients commonly missing from picture books”. Having been made aware that male picture book protagonists outnumber females by a ratio of two to one, I accept that this particular ingredient can't reasonably be described as "commonly missing" from picture books and have now cut it from the list.


I’ve also made some minor revisions to the NATURE and NURTURE and FIGHTERS and FASHIONISTAS essays. These are chiefly to maintain consistency with the revised COOL not CUTE essay and there are no significant changes to their content.

Some like-minded views and my issue with the Waterstones shortlist

Having neglected this blog over the winter, I’m intending to do a few more posts in the coming months. Among other things, I’m planning to produce a revised version of the COOL not CUTE essay which contains my main argument. I’ve had a lot of feedback both supportive and critical in the two years since it first went online and I want to make some changes in response to this. I’ll be cutting “A Male Protagonist” from the list of “boy-friendly ingredients that are commonly missing from picture books”, having been persuaded that that particular ingredient can't reasonably be described as "commonly missing". And I’m also planning to update the sections relating to the lack of gender balance in children’s book reviewing and children’s book awards having now spent some time researching these areas in more detail.

In the meantime I thought I’d highlight a couple of articles written by others with like-minded views that have recently become available online.

Sarah Threlkeld-Brown is the lead education consultant for reading at Andrell Education and the co-creator of Big Reading and The Reading Criterion Scale. A former primary school teacher, Sarah describes herself as being passionate about “‘hooking’ reluctant readers into reading through fantastic texts.” As well as helping schools to develop reading strategies, she is a Reading Expert for Oxford University Press, whose levelled reading schemes are widely used in UK primary schools.

Sarah shares many of my views about the current disconnect between what boys want to read and what reading material is readily available to them and wrote an article on this theme for Teach Primary magazine which is now available online. The article references some of the arguments found on this blog but also touches upon Sarah's experience of trying to keep her own son engaged with books. I recommend reading the whole article, but here’s an excerpt relating to that.

“And herein lay the problem. The books being sent home were not the books my son wanted to read. They did not appeal to his inner speed-demon or his passion for all things mechanical and gadget-driven. They did not push his adrenaline buttons in the same way as reading books about trains, planes and automobiles, or watching programmes such as Top Gear or The Incredibles. He would not read his school books; he could not see the point. I was at my wits’ end.”

Fortunately the story has a happy ending, partly because Sarah recognised that the problem lay with the content rather than the medium and helped her son find other reading material that matched his tastes more accurately. However she acknowledges that not all parents will have the time, inclination or in-depth knowledge of children’s literature to do this.

“He [now] enjoys reading, whether it’s Dirt Bike, Moto X or the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz. He reads for pleasure and for information; however, this has little to do with the early reading materials he was given by his school. I had the wherewithal to encourage and develop his reading outside school, but many parents of the boys we teach will not.”

Alison Sage has been working as a children’s book editor since 1971. She’s worked with a variety of publishers including Random House, Oxford University Press, Harper Collins and Hodder and has also written many children’s books of her own. She is the only editor I know who routinely takes stories into schools to test their appeal on children before accepting them for publication. Alison has edited nine of my books and when I first wrote my COOL not CUTE essay, she was one of the people working in children’s publishing who gave me feedback on it before I published it online. She generously agreed to act as editor for the three essays that can be found at the top of this blog and – as always – left my writing in a much better state than she found it in!

Porter Anderson has just included several comments from Alison in a wide-ranging article about the need for gender-balanced publishing for US website Thought Catalog. Again I strongly recommend reading the whole article as Anderson makes many strong points, but here are some excerpts from Alison's contributions. Like Sarah, Alison draws on her own experience as a parent as well as a professional and has this to say about trying to get her own son to read.

“I realized that my younger son would do anything, anything at all, rather than “read a good book” – and his friends were the same. They had no physical problems I could see (although sometimes their parents said they were dyslexic) but their reading ages were low and their comprehension of what they had read even lower. I went into schools and talked to teachers, read with children and talked to them, trying to find out what was going on — and found that my son’s attitude was repeated up and down the country. 

At that time, I had been asked to work on some reading books for a new series. The publisher wanted to know why their previous reading series was not popular, even though it was written by some of the best children’s authors — classics, in fact. The reason I discovered was that children, especially boys, love strong plots with lots happening. They aren’t so interested in the subtleties of human behavior in the abstract. They want to see it in action – quickly.”

And she goes on to say this about the conversations she and I had about the scarcity of picture books which appeal uncompromisingly to boy-typical tastes.

“We talked about what children liked to read about, especially when he had children of his own, and agreed that a few publishers’ editors were not happy with some of the ideas we felt boys would love. 

Maybe — and just maybe — this was related to the fact that as small girls, they had enjoyed girls’ books and been praised for preferring cleaner, quieter play-times.”

The top of a Waterstones Children's Book Prize winning traits infographic from 2014

If you read the rest of Anderson's article you’ll see that, given the problems with boys’ reading, both he and I were taken aback by the lack of gender balance among the authors and illustrators shortlisted for this year’s Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. While I don’t doubt that all of the shortlisted authors and illustrators deserve recognition for their work, I do doubt that there are so few male authors and illustrators who are equally worthy of recognition. Only 3 of the 19 authors and illustrators on both the 2014 and Waterstones 2015 shortlists are male. This pronounced gender skew seems particularly inappropriate given the evidence of the Goodreads reader analysis that was published last November.

Based on data from 40,000 of Goodread’s most active readers (20,000 female, 20,000 male) the analysis shows that both male and female readers have a strong preference for authors of the same sex. 90% of the 50 most-read books by men were written by male authors, and an identical 90% of the 50 most-read books by women were written by female authors. Goodreads’ editor in chief Elizabeth Khuri Chandler has said that responses to the analysis suggest that “most people were unaware of the gender breakdown of the book they were reading” and that “for the most part, people are saying that they don’t set out to read a male author or a female author. It’s all about the book.” From which it seems reasonable to conclude that GENERALLY female authors are particularly adept at writing books that appeal to female readers and male authors are particularly adept at writing books that appeal to male readers.

Given this evidence, if we want to encourage children of both sexes to read, it seems reasonable to expect high profile children’s book awards like Waterstones’ to highlight the best books written by both sexes. Grown-up book awards like the Booker are reasonably gender-balanced in both their shortlists and judging panels. Shouldn’t we be trying to replicate this in the world of children’s literature?

The issues Anderson raises in his article are among those being discussed in FutureBook’s #FutureChat on Twitter this Friday at 4.00pm UK time*, so if you’re on Twitter and have an opinion on this, he’d love to hear from you.

* Friday 20 February, 4 pm London time, 11 am New York time.