We investigated how gender is represented in children's books using a novel 200,000 word corpus comprising 247 popular, contemporary books for young children. Using human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified gender biases of words in individual books and in the whole corpus. We find that children's books contain many words that…

The manner in which gender is portrayed in materials used to teach children conveys messages about people's roles in society. In this paper, we measure the gendered depiction of central domains of social life in 100 years of highly influential children's books. We make two main contributions: (1) we find that the portrayal of gender in these books…

Societal stereotypes depict girls as less interested than boys in computer science and engineering. We demonstrate the existence of these stereotypes among children and adolescents from first to 12th grade and their potential negative consequences for girls' subsequent participation in these fields. Studies 1 and 2 (n = 2,277; one preregistered)…

There is a need to help more students succeed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, with particular interest in reducing current gender gaps in motivation and participation. We propose a new theoretical model, the STEreotypes, Motivation, and Outcomes (STEMO) developmental model, to account for and integrate recent…

Students' perceptions of their mathematics ability vary by gender and seem to influence science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degree choice. Related, students' perceptions during academic difficulty are increasingly studied in educational psychology, suggesting a link between such perceptions and task persistence. Despite…