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Portrayals of Race and Gender: Sentiment in 100 Years of Children’s Literature

Published: 29 June 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The way that people of different identities are portrayed in children’s books can send subconscious messages about how positively or negatively children should think about people with those identities. These messages can then shape the next generation’s perceptions and attitudes about people, which can have important implications for belief formation and resource allocation. In this paper, we make two contributions: (1) we examine the depiction of race and gender in award-winning children’s books from the last century, and (2) we examine how consumption of these books relates to local beliefs. First, we analyze the sentiment associated with the famous individuals mentioned in these books. While the sentiment surrounding women is positive overall, on average, we see that Black women are more often portrayed with negative sentiment in Mainstream books, while White women are more often portrayed with positive sentiment. Because children’s books in the United States depict more White women overall, this disguises the more negative intersectional portrayals of Black women. Books that center underrepresented identities are more likely to portray all characters with more positive sentiment. A century ago, women were much less positively spoken about than men, but the average sentiment of females and males has converged over time. The difference in sentiment connected with Black people and White people has also decreased over time, but there still remains a substantial gap. Second, we then analyze the relationship between book purchases and local beliefs to understand the potential messages being transmitted to children in different parts of society. We see that more purchases of books with positive sentiment towards Black characters are associated with a larger proportion of individuals who believe that White people in the United States have certain advantages because of the color of their skin and who are angry that racism exists. Understanding the messages that may be implicitly – or explicitly – sent to children through highly influential books can lend insight into the factors that may shape children’s beliefs and attitudes.

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  • (2025)The Contribution of Translingual Writers to the Diversity of British and American Children’s Book MarketsLogos10.1163/18784712-2024003035:4(22-31)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2025
  • (2024)From words to genderInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2024.10364761:3Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
  • (2023)What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s BooksThe Quarterly Journal of Economics10.1093/qje/qjad028138:4(2225-2285)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
COMPASS '22: Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
June 2022
710 pages
ISBN:9781450393478
DOI:10.1145/3530190
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 29 June 2022

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Author Tags

  1. children’s books
  2. education
  3. gender
  4. race
  5. sentiment analysis

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)The Contribution of Translingual Writers to the Diversity of British and American Children’s Book MarketsLogos10.1163/18784712-2024003035:4(22-31)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2025
  • (2024)From words to genderInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2024.10364761:3Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
  • (2023)What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s BooksThe Quarterly Journal of Economics10.1093/qje/qjad028138:4(2225-2285)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2023
  • (undefined)What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s BooksSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.3825080

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