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.

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