Which animals are gendered in kids’ books? And why are so many of them boys? Those are questions a Massachusetts data-journalist dad and researchers at the University of Washington set out to answer. Of course, before they could do that, they had to determine if their niggling feeling was correct: Do most animals in children’s books and in people’s minds s skew male?
The answer — after analyzing 300 books and responses from 1,300 people asked to complete the sentence And then the bear said, ‘I must go to the river.’ Upon arriving….” — was clear. Yes, more animals in kids’ books are referred to by male pronouns. But gender neutrality certainly made a show.
“There was a lot more gender neutrality and ambiguity in the survey responses—though, since their stories were much shorter than a typical kid’s book, it was perhaps easier to maintain gender neutrality,” the researchers wrote when they published their analysis results last year on The Pudding, where their results are both easy to understand and cutely laid out. “While he/him was still the most frequently used pronoun in the survey results, many respondents referred to the animal by name (26%), by it (17%), or by they/them (3%).”
University of Washington researcher Melissa Walsh and doctoral students Imani Finkley and Yuanxi Li didn’t stop after identifying those animal pronoun trends. They became curious what happened to the results when books were written with artificial intelligence.
The upshot of their new study, aptly entitled “Neutrality Bites: Gender Representation in AI-Generated Animal Stories“? AI models writing kids’ animal stories don’t just repeat human gender bias; they erase female characters almost entirely, defaulting to “it” or no gender 57% of the time and giving animals female pronouns just 2% of the time.
