Parents of preschoolers spend 33% more on books for girls than books for boys

It’s been over a year since I last posted on this blog. Having focussed on publishers, book awards and newspaper reviews in previous years I’d intended to write some posts focussing on schools this year. Unfortunately, I’ve been too busy with other commitments, but I still hope to do this at some point, but probably not until 2017.

In the meantime I thought I’d put up this stopgap post to highlight some relevant research from a recently published report from Childwise.

It's no secret that most book buyers are women or that most picture books are purchased by mothers and grandmothers. A 2013 Bowker report on the UK, US and Canadian children’s book market showed that 84% of picture book buyers are female.

84% of picture books are bought by female customers.
Source: Bowker- Understanding the Children's Book Consumer in the Digital Age 2013

"Parents spend 33% more on books for their daughters than they do on books for their sons, spending £8 per month on books for girls compared with £6 per month on books for boys"

The assumption I’d been making up until now was that, while picture book buyers may be predominately women, there was an even boy/girl split in the children they where buying for. However the Childwise report, which surveyed the parents of one thousand 0 to 4-year-olds in the UK, suggests otherwise. The report shows that parents spend 33% more on books for their daughters than they do on books for their sons, spending £8 per month on books for girls compared with £6 per month on books for boys.

The report looked at eight other preschool product categories (clothes, days out, organized activities, footwear, magazines, DVDs/Blu-Rays, apps and games) and found that collectively parents spend 16% more on girls than boys each month (£101 per month on boys £117 per month on girls). Parents spend more on preschool girls than boys in every category except ‘DVDs/Blu-Rays’ and ‘apps and games’ where there was an equal spend on both sexes.

I think it’s reasonable to suggest that, following the law of supply and demand, this gender skew in preschool book demand might play some part in the skewed gender appeal of the output of the picture book industry.

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In other news, an author got in touch with me this week to draw my attention to the disappointing news that next year’s Carnegie and Greenaway Medals will once again be judged by a woman-only panel. I wrote a series of posts about this in 2013-2014 explaining why I think gender-balanced judging of this and other children’s book awards could help to close the gender gap in children’s reading for pleasure. You can find a summary of the main points in this post.

UPDATE Feb 2017: Since I published this post in October 2016, Jake Hope has been added to 2017 Carnegie and Greenaway Judging Panel changing the balance to 13 women and 1 man.