The more Joseph McIntyre, Ed.M.'10, Ed.D.'17, read to his baby daughter, the more he realized that most of the books were about boys — to the point that he began to switch the genders of main characters.

“It made me wonder how things looked in children’s literature as a whole,” he says. While a student in the doctoral program, McIntyre began analyzing existing research. Previous studies found ratios of male-to-female central characters in picture books of 1.5:1 to 2:1. However, he realized these studies had treated all books in their samples equally. As he continued his doctoral research, which eventually became his dissertation, he says, “I thought there was room for a new perspective” that took into account the popularity of books. “If popular books have more male central characters than unpopular books, then the books which kids actually read, and which presumably shape their understandings of gender, may be even more disproportionately male than scholars realized.”

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