To find it deflating that majority of children's song/book characters are "he"?

[Radradrad]

To name some examples:
Five Little Monkeys (fell off and bumped HIS head. Every monkey in that song is male).

Miss Polly Had a Dolly (male doctor, though being a female doctor myself I always sing over it with "she") 😂 actually more accurate since the majority of GP's are women.

Don't get me started on dinosaurs in books and songs, no wonder the dinosaurs went extinct as it seems there wasn't a single female dinosaur?

And then shows like Hey Duggee, which I actually do like, but there are 6 main characters and only two are female. Why?! And I downright refuse to have Octonauts on as none of the main characters are female.

Omg one more thing, the fact EVERYONE thinks Bluey is a boy when she is a girl! Just because she isnt pink/wearing a dress. Asda even have her on boys underwear!

Is it just me?!

Its never even crossed my mind or thought about it.
Ill probably notice it all the time now

YANBU. Older kids picture books aren’t so bad and we’ve got lots with great female characters but I find toddler board books annoying for making all of the animals/inanimate objects male.

like a pp I change the pronouns around for Dear Zoo, 5 Little Monkeys etc.

I don’t think it is the case with nursery rhymes - Little Bo Peep, Little Miss Muffett, Lucy Locket, Mary Mary, Old Mother Hubbard, There Was A Little Girl, Jack and Jill, I can think of loads of female nursery rhyme characters.
My own reading as an older child was very female character heavy as well, Malory Towers, St Clare’s, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, the Dido Twite books, Charlotte Sometimes, When Marnie Was There, Marianne Dreams, Nancy Drew, A Little Princess. Lucy, Jill and Polly in the Narnia books, Rebecca’s World, What Katy Did. With some notable exceptions - The Dark is Rising, Tolkien.
Obviously you have to look at what the characters are doing as well as the fact they are there, lot of those are pretty domestic but not all of them. Dido, for example, kicks ass.
The first time I remember getting in a snit about lack of female representation in books was when I got into the Fighting Fantasy books . They are “you” as a pronoun, but “you” is clearly male and it said on the back they were fine stories for boys, or something similar.

I love the fact that Bluey, as a blue character, is a girl. And that none of the games she and her sister play are stereotypically 'girly.'

It annoys me when female characters are marketed towards girls and male characters towards boys. I know you absolutely can shop from the 'boys' area of clothes shops, and I do, but a lot of people would not do this and so their girls are always stuck with Sky on t shirts even if their favourite character is, say, Rocky.

Female characters being shallow and stereotypical also annoys me. We holiday at Park Dean caravan sites quite a lot and two of their mascots are girls, great, but one is Pink and into fashion and selfies and the other is sporty, which is fantastic, but then also equally obsessed with make up. Why? Why can't she just be sporty??

I remember always being really annoyed as a child in the 90s that my meccano sets always featured a boy.

Having said that, i do love octonauts. Banacle is basically captain kirk.

Surely it is a good thing if Asda have Bluey on boys’ clothes. Why shouldn’t boys wear a female cartoon dog character on their clothes?

I am the one singing the monkeys and miss polly song. I can and do vary the pronouns. Miss Polly can be Mr Polly (who says it’s a first name) and the doctor can be he or she. The monkeys can be male or female. Same with the frogs on the log and so on.

DS3 likes creature cases on Netflix. It’s basically octonauts on land (complete with a rip off of the creature report bit at the end). The main characters are a male snow leopard and a female fox. The director of the agency is female. The tech support is provided by Bill and Jill (who are mice).

Maybe watch that instead and feel more positive about the world.

Always change the pronouns for the Gruffalo, find it very weird that all the animals are boys!

I don’t think it’s that much of a prejudice - I think it’s those eyebrows! Humans just pick up patterns and attribute them to the male or female sex. Bluey does look like a boy and not because she’s blue. Everyone I know thought she was before watching the programme. Even so, I think the fact she’s a dog and the features represent a cartoon version of the breed more make it less immediately obvious.

Lovely programme though. Love the parent-child interactions!

@hoarahloux the Gruffalo's child is a girl though.

If you only read the gruffalo, I don’t think the mouse’s sex is specified. It is a he in the gruffalo’s child though.

This really took me aback when I became a parent. Kids tv shows and the main characters/ leaders are nearly always male.

Exactly! I have two boys and both my DM and I struggled to find books for them that had male lead characters - they are ALL girls - so frustrating!

I thought Bluey was a boy because she's blue like her dad and her sister looks like her mum. I'm not sure my logic is much better than your unconscious bias

FACT FILE

Paw patrol have recently added liberty who is a girl.

In the gruffalo i always thought the mouse was female as she has to fend off all the male attackers when she just wants to go for a nice walk.....

min are teens now but from memory when DD was little she loved the below which all had main girl characters. the boys also watched a lot of the below.

Dora the explorer
Angelina ballerina
lazytown main character is a girl
peppa pig
fifi
tracey beaker
max and ruby
doc mcstuffins
cloudbabies had 2 girls and 2 boys
Ben and holly

im not saying that gender equality is not a problem but DD managed to watch/read/songs lots of things with female characters.

yes.

With a wee dance break built in. Download incomplete: move your feet!

Why can't a female character be on male underwear? Being female doesn't mean boys can't like you fgs. Bothy 4 yo twins adore their bluey pants. Their penis hasn't shrivelled up and fell off.

And she was all three of my boys favourite. See also Owlette from PJ Masks. We just bought girl pajamas

I find it even more depressing the amount of clearly middle class children in TV dramas and book adaptations.

My daughter grew up thinking that doctors were all female and nurses were male, because of a book we had.

Am also a female doctor and our family doctor was female too, so that reinforced the idea for her. She was very surprised when she found out that doctors could be male!

Wrong
Captain Barnacles is Captain Tom from the Last Ship and Kwazzi is Nolan from the same show

Well that's good news.

I do exactly the same with Dear Zoo!