@article{TEXTUAL,
      recid = {9248},
      author = {Adukia, Anjali and Eble, Alex and Harrison, Emileigh and  Runesha, Hakizumwami Birali and Szasz, Teodora},
      title = {What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in  Images and Text of Children’s Books},
      journal = {The Quarterly Journal of Economics},
      address = {2023-08-31},
      number = {TEXTUAL},
      abstract = {Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in  part through representation of different characters. We use  computational tools to characterize representation in  children’s books widely read in homes, classrooms, and  libraries over the past century and describe economic  forces that may contribute to these patterns. We introduce  new artificial intelligence methods for systematically  converting images into data. We apply these tools,  alongside text analysis methods, to measure skin color,  race, gender, and age in the content of these books,  documenting what has changed and what has endured over  time. We find underrepresentation of Black and Latinx  people in the most influential books, relative to their  population shares, though representation of Black  individuals increases over time. Females are also  increasingly present but appear less often in text than in  images, suggesting greater symbolic inclusion in pictures  than substantive inclusion in stories. Characters in these  influential books have lighter average skin color than in  other books, even after conditioning on race, and children  are depicted with lighter skin color than adults on  average. We present empirical analysis of related economic  behavior to better understand the representation we find in  these books. On the demand side, we show that people  consume books that center their own identities and that the  types of children’s books purchased correlate with local  political beliefs. On the supply side, we document higher  prices for books that center nondominant social identities  and fewer copies of these books in libraries that serve  predominantly White communities.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/9248},
}