Read enough children’s books with anthropomorphic animals and you might notice that some animals tend towards a gender like a male frog or a female cat. For the Pudding, Melanie Walsh, with Russell Samora, Michelle Pera-McGhee, and Jan Diehm, found out how often and why with an analysis of 300 books and a reader experiment.
To find picture books that specifically feature anthropomorphic animals, we selected any book that had “animals” as one of its top Goodreads tags; any book that was tagged as “animals” in the Children’s Book Database; or any book that GPT-4o identified as featuring animals (after being prompted with its title, author, and description). We then manually evaluated every book and every representation of animal characters (for more on how we determined “anthropomorphic” animals, see below). We excluded anthologies and collections, like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
The story is framed into acts and an interactive to see all the books in the dataset, which is available on GitHub.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics (2nd Edition)
