Poster #110 - Creating a Gender Neutral Character

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Children's picture books are a significant source of gender information (Ben, 1983; Bussey & Bandura, 2003). Females in these books are significantly underrepresented and characters tend to be stereotyped according to their gender (Lindsay, submitted; Weitzman et al., 1972). Underrepresentation is exacerbated by the fact that people tend to assume that an unknown person is male unless otherwise indicated (Hamilton, 1991; Lambdin et al., 2003). Some suggest that creating a character who is gender neutral may be a solution so that a child of any gender can be free to identify with those characters.

The proposed study will compare specific features of illustrated faces to examine the possibility of building a gender-ambiguous face. Research on face perception indicates that people are generally successful at identifying the gender of a face (Simpkins, 2011; Wild et al., 2000). Eyes, nose, and eyebrows are significant contributors to the categorization of male or female (Bruce et al., 1993; Burton et al., 1993). Additionally, most face perception research removes hair as a clearly gendered-cue. Thus face stimuli for this study were constructed from a character building illustration set balancing all four features: eyes, nose, eyebrows, and hair.

Based on the existing research it is hypothesized that faces will be categorized as male unless they have at least 3 out 4 features which are female. This is based on Thorne et al. (2015) which presented female-to-male morphed faces and found that faces were categorized as male at a lower percentage of "maleness". This male bias will be demonstrated through children telling stories about the faces and using more masculine pronouns than feminine or neutral.

Understanding which features contribute to viewing a character as gender-ambiguous could create a pathway for author, illustrators, and other creators of child-directed media, to develop media that children of any gender may identify with. Children who read stories about same-gendered characters have increases in their self-esteem (Ochman, 1996). Being able to create gender-ambiguous characters would help increase parity by allowing children to assign their own gender to characters, as well as decrease the effects of stereotyping by broadening the genders associated with certain traits and behaviors.

Authors

• Jennifer Lindsay, Colgate University
  Presenting Author

• Lita Wright, Colgate University