"Where are the girls in children's literature?"

Contributor Adrian Allen at Ms. Magazine wrote about a comprehensive study made by the sociology journal of Gender and Society for Young Adult book titles between 1900 and 2000. They found that there was a distinct difference in gender representation within YA book titles: boy protagonists figured prominently 57% of the time, with girls as the lead in 31% of the titles (the rest being made up by animal protagonists with a split of male-to-female of 23: 7.5% ).  The study indicates too, that during the period of 1990-2000, there was more gender parity than ever before, so why the fuss?

Here is Adrian Allen's article on it:

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/05/25/where-are-the-girls-in-childrens-lit/comment-page-1/#comment-29580

Of course the big question among feminists is how do we improve on this trend ? The author describes it as a kind of "symbolic annihilation." Does this mean that there are fewer female children's book writers than male writers? Some will cite that, as it is in all the arts, male artists/writers are the norm; they are taken more seriously at pursuing the calling of such craft, and as such, proliferate and exist in higher numbers. There is the belief that until women artists and writers "get a wife" (nanny, cook, housemaid, etc.) they will be always relegated to an afterthought in the art world. To much of this I agree....

But here's another thought:  Just because the demographic of women to men is about 50/50, doesn't necessarily mean that the protagonists in kids' books should break down into similar numbers. If there are as many female writers as there are male writers, then perhaps many women writers actually prefer to write about boy heroes (JK Rowling's Harry Potter?), in which case, that would cause us to ask different questions such as: why would women writers choose to write instead about boys and not about girls? 

What does this say about our expectations about the stories that we think writers-- and, by extension, artists-- should create?


And does the genre of the story dictate the kinds of heroes that are acceptable / plausible? (ie. No one really buys the armored girl in the medieval story unless it's about Joan of Arc-- and she was killed.) Perhaps these gender numbers would have more parity within sci-fi stories for young people because it's a more plausible setting.