Implicit Gender Inequality in Children’s Picture Books: Evidence from a Text Mining Analysis of 200 Bestselling Chinese and British Titles

As the primary resource for preschool children, picture books,and their gender narratives, can unconsciously shape and changechildren’s perceptions of sex roles and gender identity (Bleakley etal., 1988; Connor & Serbin, 1978; Latima, 2020). However, existingstudies show concerning trends in the representation of genderinequality in modern picture books, such as the overwhelmingnumber of male main characters and traditional gender stereotypesof vocations, personalities and habits (Casey et al., 2021; Hamiltonet al., 2006; Lee & Chin, 2019; Terras, 2018). It is thereforeimportant for children’s picture books to have diverse gender descriptionsand improved equal gender representations.Since the second Feminist Movement in the 1960s, gender equalityin UK children’s picture books have been continuously examinedyet slowly improved (Adams et al., 2011; Allen et al., 1993;Capuzza, 2020; Hamilton et al., 2006). Similar studies have beenfar less common in China, as the Chinese picture book market onlydeveloped from the start of the 21 st Century (Xiao, 2021). Onestudy has shown the existence of the traditional gender biases inChinese picture books (Liu & Chen, 2018). Based on the researchgap between these two countries, this study will (1) investigategender representations and narratives in picture books, (2) comparethe similarities and differences between bestselling Britishand Chinese picture books texts from 2010 to 2020. We do so byapplying text mining techniques to analyse gender narratives withinpicture book texts themselves. This follows on from our 2022study where we analysed publisher’s descriptions of texts, ratherthan full text mining of the book’s content (Li et al., 2022).