On the problem of gender-specific books

Children’s & YA Specialist Emily Gale muses on the difficulties and debates surrounding gender-specific books, and asks just who is the villain here?


British newspaper, The Independent, recently published a fiery article decrying children books that are gender-specific in which literary editor Katy Guest wrote, “Gender-specific books demean all our children. So The Independent on Sunday will no longer review anything marketed to exclude either sex.” The article attracted a lot of attention on social media, as well as comments on The Independent’s website (ranging from uproarious support to trolls spewing biological determinism), and was a well-timed addition to the creation of Let Books Be Books. This campaign is urging children’s publishers to take the ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ labels off books and allow children to choose freely what kinds of stories and activity books interest them.

As much as I support Guest’s sentiment, and wring my hands daily at the gender (and other) inequalities I see in children’s publishing, I felt a bit cynical about how much impact this column, and The Independent’s future actions, will have. In a follow-up article, Guest wrote, “If I’m really honest, [the policy is] not that new… I’ve been rejecting these books which limit children’s choices and narrow their imaginations for ages, it turns out. I just thought it was worth making that explicit.” So it seems likely that the impact will be minimal. I’m not criticising the bandwagon, just the method of jumping onto it.

If all good debates have a hero, it’s equally important they have a villain too and publisher Michael O'Mara is the current despot du jour. In the past he has defended the children’s activity books he produces that have ‘For Boys’ and ‘For Girls’ on the covers by revealing that they sell three times more than activity books without those subtitles.

It’s too easy to make O'Mara the villain here. But this is not a simple story. It has a cast of thousands and too many sub-plots. I’m yet to read an online article or newspaper column that hits the nail on the head and perhaps this is because there is no single nail to hit - this debate is more like Whack-A-Mole. And we’re all at fault: publishers make the books, bookshops sell the books, customers buy the books - and the process isn’t linear, it’s circular. As soon as you decorate the nursery, or name your daughter after a flower, or tell your son he ‘needs’ a haircut - then you’re swept up in the circle too.

As both a bookseller and a parent, I feel doubly implicated. You might come across the odd ‘For Boys’ / ‘For Girls’ sticker book in the department I buy for. Not many, but a few. Should I censor those books by not having them in the shop at all? That seems to be another thorny issue. I wish you wouldn’t buy them, will that do? I was sad to hear a fellow bookseller report that her suggestion of a Spot book for a little girl was rejected “because Spot is a boy dog”, but then I began thinking about how I contribute to building a similar attitude with my recommendations. I’ve sold plenty of copies of Sonya Hartnett’s picture book The Boy and The Toy to adults buying for boys, but I know I don’t reach for it quite as often when it’s a girl they’re buying for. And if it were called The Girl And The Toy…? Well, apart from the title being a lot less pleasing on the tongue, I know a lot of customers buying for boys would reject that outright.

Recently I gave a talk to some primary-school children at a library and afterwards one boy said that he didn’t want to read one of my books “because it’s pink”, but he did want to read the other “yellow one”. The books are about the same female character so it wasn’t reading about a girl he had a problem with, as so many people in publishing assume, but instead the packaging. Should we then ban pink? That doesn’t seem like the answer either.

Things are looking up for covers of young adult books, at least. The cover for The Fault In Our Stars - by far the bestselling young adult title of the last couple of years at Readings - proved that less is more and that bold colours and text design works. Happily, this has become a trend, as explained in this excellent article by author E. Kristin Anderson, with lots of examples: Text is the New Black: The new face (or lackthereof) of YA book covers.

Yellow has long been the gender-neutral colour, and I couldn’t help noticing what a lot of yellow books there are at the moment. So there is hope in places, as much as there are still new books being produced that make careless assumptions about what little boys and little girls are made of.

One thing I’m really happy to note is that as quickly as kids slide into gender-based fads, they also slide back out of them completely unscathed. The girl who won’t touch anything but Rainbow Magic between four and six will by ten declare that glitter-free Holes or Hatchet are the best books in the world. The boy who loves Zac Power and Spiderman will soon enough meet Hermione and Katniss. And this is what keeps me from wringing my hands to dishcloths. We’ll keep taking two steps forward, one step back and a probably a few more to the side, and eventually we’ll get there.


Emily Gale

Cover image for The Boy And The Toy,

The Boy And The Toy,

Sonya Hartnett

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