Gender Representation in Perpustakaan Intan

There is little research on gender-related children's picture books in Indonesia. In this article, we discuss the disclosure of gender representation in a picture book entitled Perpustakaan Intan. The high number appearances of women, the actions pinned on women, and the clothes displayed in both text and images are materials for visualizing women and men. Previous studies have revealed that men dominate the number of appearances in books. However, this book displays women more often than men. On the one hand, this raises the question of whether this means women are in power, and on the other hand, men are portrayed as powerless. Utilizing the multimodality approach, the results show that although women appear more in the narrative, women are still represented as less powerful.

Gender Representation in TV Advertising for Children: Children’s perceptions and advertising literacy

Children are becoming consumers at increasingly younger age and are more influential in consumption decisions within the family. Television still is one of the main ways they are exposed to advertising. Our study focuses on gender stereotypes on TV advertisements for children and combines a content analysis of advertisements and focus groups with children between 7 and 12 years old. Our findings show that, during a period of 3 months, about 75% of TV advertisements for children contain gender stereotypes. In addition, children are able to recognize such stereotypes, and in general do not identify or agree with the way each gender is portrayed. Finally, children display good levels of advertising literacy, as they are able to recognize the intentions of the brands in the commercials.

Sixty years of gender representation in children’s books: Conditions associated with overrepresentation of male versus female protagonists

As a reflection of prominent cultural norms, children’s literature plays an integral role in the acquisition and development of societal attitudes. Previous reports of male overrepresentation in books targeted towards children are consistent with a history of gender disparity across media and society. However, it is unknown whether such bias has been attenuated in recent years with increasing emphasis on gender equity and greater accessibility of books. Here, we provide an up-to-date estimate of the relative proportion of males and females featured as single protagonists in 3,280 children’s books (0–16 years) published between 1960–2020. We find that although the proportion of female protagonists has increased over this 60-year period, male protagonists remain overrepresented even in recent years. Importantly, we also find persistent effects related to author gender, age of the target audience, character type (human vs. non-human), and book genre (fiction vs. non-fiction) on the male-to-female ratio of protagonists. We suggest that this comprehensive account of the factors influencing the rates of appearance of male and female protagonists can be leveraged to develop specific recommendations for promoting more equitable gender representation in children’s literature, with important consequences for child development and society.

Gender Representation Cues Labels of Hard and Soft Sciences

While women's representation in STEM fields has increased over the past several decades, some fields have seen a greater increase women's participation than others. In the present research, we explore how women's participation in STEM disciplines influences labeling of those disciplines as hard vs. soft sciences. Study 1 found that increasing perceived participation of women in a STEM discipline increased the likelihood that participants would label it a soft science. Study 2 found that among people who did not work in science, this tendency to associate women's participation with soft science was correlated with endorsement of stereotypes about women's STEM competency. And Studies 3A and 3B showed that labeling disciplines as soft sciences led to the fields being devalued, deemed less rigorous, and less worthy of federal funding. These studies show that stereotypes about women's STEM competency can impact perceptions of fields in which women participate, with consequences for how scientific disciplines are perceived.

Domination of Women? Gender Representation in the Corpus of Late Neolithic Anthropomorphic Figurines

Since the inception of the discipline of archaeology, figurines have been considered as the basis for research into the praehistoric social order and religious ideas. In spite of the numerous critiques, the idea that they are the reflection of adoration of Mother Goddess and fertility cults, has persevered even to the present day, mainly thanks to the work of Maria Gimbutas. Her simplified approach to praehistory, apart from giving rise to pseudo-archaeological narratives, has induced severe criticism and polemics inside archaeology. The concept of the Goddess has migrated during the recent period from the academic writing to the realm of pseudo-science, daily politics and activism. In our country, the ideas of the Golden Past, considered to be the origin of the European civilization, are particularly present in the „grey zone“: the public sphere, facilitated through media. All these narratives are based upon the preconception that in the Neolithic collections the representations of women dominate. The results of the preliminary analyses of gender representation in Neolithic assemblages have proven that the claims of women’s dominance are ill-founded, and emphasized once more the significant presence, or even dominance of asexual figurines. On the other hand, the criteria for identification have shown to be unreliable, raising the question of usefulness of such attempts, as well as a number of new questions. Primarily, the role and meaning of the presence/absence of secondary sex attributes, their correlation to age, as well as possible regional differences in meaning and function of figurines are discussed.