School children in the UK tend to place male characters in the stories they write martin-dm/Getty Images
Stories written by children are far more likely to feature male characters – regardless of whether the writer is a boy or a girl.
Yaling Hsiao at the University of Oxford and her colleagues analysed more than 100,000 short stories written by British children, aged 5 to 13, for a national writing competition organised by the BBC in 2019.
The researchers wanted to find out how a child’s gender influenced the gender of the characters they wrote about. They also wanted to…
