Both boys and girls tend to write stories about boys

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

Stories written by children are far more likely to feature male characters – regardless of whether the writer is a boy or a girl.

Yaling Hsiao at the University of Oxford and her colleagues analysed more than 100,000 short stories written by British children, aged 5 to 13, for a national writing competition organised by the BBC in 2019.

The researchers wanted to find out how a child’s gender influenced the gender of the characters …