By contrast, females are typically depicted indoors and as filling domestic roles, such as performing household chores and caring for children [23, 29, 31, 32]. Notably, these null interactions included those with publication year, suggesting persistent effects of the moderators of the male-to-female ratio across time. Thus, the final sample consisted of 3,280 childrens books published between 1960 and 2020 with either a male or female central character (see OSF for full dataset). Moreover, the evidence that does exist post 2000 is contradictory, with some data suggesting little or no improvement in the frequency of female characters [33] and other data suggesting that the numbers of male and female characters have reached parity [34]. Imperfect and absurd, the modern literary heroine is a woman of our times Privacy Statement This field of study had a significant impact on how people perceived gender roles. We report all measures collected, along with exclusion information below. Women in fiction may have shrugged some of the strait jacketed representations but anytime a woman character chooses to live life on her terms, readers tend to get agitated. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. The dotted line at 0.5 denotes parity. In Panel A, they plot collection-by-decade averages of female representation in images (on the y axis) and female representation in text (on the x axis). To this end, we examined each moderator, and the corresponding interactions, across time. Theyhad no sexual freedom and no chance to pursue a professional career. Elizabeth is a confident woman who would rather sacrifice financial security than be stuck in a loveless marriage. I had rather be a toad And live upon the vapor of a dungeon Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others uses. Yet, books by American authors can help us grasp it better. A binomial logistic regression analysis revealed that the ratio of male to female central characters changed significantly over the sampled time frame, such that the proportion of male protagonists decreased between 1960 and 2020, reflecting a trend towards parity, B = -0.02, Z = -4.63, p < .001, OR = 0.99, 95% CI = [0.98, 0.99] (Fig 2). The novels were selected primarily from the HathiTrust Digital Library and represented a selection of bestsellers from the years 1703 to 2009. Constructions of female madness in literature: an exploration of the freedom and confinement of mad female narrators in 'The Yellow Wallpaper' and 'Shatter Me'. examine the representation of women in literary works; present the top 20 gender-related essay topics. Even before trends in publication reach parity, knowledge of these effects may help parents and educators to select less biased samples of books for individual children.