Bears Will Be Boys

Finding the Data

To answer this question, we started with arguably the richest source of anthropomorphized animals in human culture: children’s picture books.

First, we identified the most popular English-language kids’ books on Goodreads that feature at least one anthropomorphized animal, focusing on the most rated titles published since 1950, plus some older and still highly rated classics.¹ We read about 30 per decade—around 300 books in total—from which we noted the gender of any anthropomorphized animal character who was important to the story.

He/him

She/her

He/him

We were also curious about how people ordinarily assign gender to animals. Authors make deliberate choices about the characters they create. Contemporary authors might be especially intentional about subverting gender stereotypes.

To dig into these tendencies, we designed an experiment. We asked more than 1,300 survey respondents to complete a story that began:

“And then the bear said, ‘I must go to the river.’ Upon arriving…”

We randomly swapped in one of seven animals: bear, bird, cat, pig, duck, mouse, or dog. We didn’t tell participants what the experiment was about.²

Each response gave us a window into how the storyteller imagined the animal, especially whether they assigned the animal a gender.

Which animals skew male vs. female?

First up: children’s books. After filtering the data to focus on animals who were explicitly gendered (she/her or he/him) and appeared in at least 10 different books, only a few animals were more consistently gendered female: birds, ducks, and cats.

She/her

She/her

She/her

She/her

Anthropomorphized Animals in Popular Children’s Books

*Animals That Appear in 10+ Books

← more he/him

more she/her →

bird

duck

cat

pig

mouse

rabbit

bear

monkey

dog

elephant

fox

wolf

frog

100% he/him

75% he/him

Equal

75% she/her

100% she/her

The rest—frog, wolf, fox, elephant, dog, monkey, bear, rabbit, mouse, and pig—skew male. Because so much of our worldview is shaped by our environment when we are young, automatically reaching for he after “look at the frog!” starts to make some sense. After all, that’s what the books say.

He/him

He/him

He/him

He/him

Anthropomorphized Animals in Survey Results

← more he/him

more she/her →

cat

bird

pig

rabbit

dog

mouse

bear

100% he/him

75% he/him

Equal

75% she/her

100% she/her

In the survey responses to our experiment, no animal tilted more female than male. The animal gender usage order almost identically mirrored those from the children’s books.

Mostly he, rarely she, and sometimes It

In the children’s books, male animal characters appeared twice as often as female characters. Male pronouns appeared nearly three times as often in the survey results—particularly striking because there were more women respondents.

In the children’s books, gender neutral language (it or they)–whether intentional or not–was not common. Only two percent of the animals were described as it. They/them was almost never used.

it

it

it

it

There was a lot more gender neutrality and ambiguity in the survey responses—though, since their stories were much shorter than a typical kid’s book, it was perhaps easier to maintain gender neutrality. While he/him was still the most frequently used pronoun in the survey results, many respondents referred to the animal by name (26%), by it (17%), or by they/them (3%).

Explore All Animal Characters

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Where did all the girl animals go?

Why are animal gender ratios so lopsided in children’s books? And why are female animals just as absent in the stories produced by the survey respondents?

Perhaps because the main character of a story is still assumed to be male by default—and maybe especially when the story’s setting lacks explicit social cues.

This aligns with decades of research—much of it quantitative—showing that male characters dominate children’s literature and media. A 2011 study found that gender disparity was actually more pronounced for animal protagonists.

But why do we gender certain animals in certain ways more than others—like cats, birds, and ladybugs as females, or bears, wolves, dogs, and frogs as males?

She/her

She/her

She/her

It’s likely the result of a rich and long-simmering cultural soup: a mix of patriarchal structures and human stereotypes, linguistic habits and famous media characters, with just a sprinkling of historical quirks to taste.

Large, strong animals like bears and wolves are often coded as masculine, while small, delicate animals like birds or kittens are more easily read as feminine.

There are also countless folk tales, stories, and metaphors that connect certain animals with human gender, some of them dating back hundreds or thousands of years.

While of course there are famous boy cats—Garfield, Felix, Puss in Boots—cats have been linked to femininity and female bodies for a long time (the slang term “pussy” is literally hundreds of years old). Cats were linked to goddesses in ancient Egypt, to witches in medieval Europe, and to TikTok girlfriends today.

Birds, too, carry associations with femininity. You can think of the caged bird as a metaphor for constrained womanhood, or all the women who get transformed into birds in Greek mythology.

These associations are embedded in the slang we use everyday, even across languages like English and Spanish. As scholar Irene López Rodríguez reminds us, we call men “studs, bucks, wolves, toros (bulls), zorros (foxes) and linces (lynxes),” and we call women “chick, bird, kitten, pollita (chicken) or gatita (kitten).” She argues that these word choices aren’t arbitrary but rather “shed some light onto the expectations and beliefs society holds about males and females.”

Thinking beyond English raises another important question: Does language influence how we perceive the gender of animals?

Some languages, like Spanish or French, have grammatical gender, where all nouns are gendered, even inanimate ones like la mesa (the table). In Spanish, many animals can be either masculine or feminine, such as the cat—el gato or la gata. But others, like the frog—la rana—are always grammatically feminine.

Are Spanish speakers more likely to perceive frogs as girls?

Maybe, at least according to a recent study. There are definitely Spanish children’s books with girl frogs in starring roles, like La Rana Mariana busca toda la semana or Rana de Tres Ojos.

Ladybugs are another intriguing case. Ladybugs are gendered as female in three of the four different books where they appear in our dataset.

She/her

She/her

She/her

Are ladybugs “ladies” in all languages?

In the English language, the word ladybird—that’s what the Brits call ladybugs—and ladycow, another common term, originated around the 1600s. “Lady” was a reference to “Our Lady,” the Virgin Mary, apparently because both the beetle and the Holy Mother like to wear red. Ladybugs were also considered somewhat divine³ because they devour the pests that plague farmers and gardeners (yes, they’re carnivores).

Somehow the name spread, possibly through colonial networks and nursery rhymes. In The History of the Ladybird: With Some Diversions on This and That, A.W. Exell documents 329 names for ladybugs in 55 languages. A full quarter of them are linked to the Virgin Mary.

Another widespread term is “God’s little cow”—also religious, feminine, and resembling the British “ladycow”—as found in Russian (божья коровка), Polish (boża krówka), and Hebrew (פרת משה רבנו). Many other names for the ladybug are similarly gendered, invoking young girls, little hens, and other diminutive feminine figures.

This reveals how the gendering of animals can be both arbitrary and deeply culturally ingrained. What began as, let’s face it, a bit of a stretch—a beetle’s symbolic connection to the Virgin Mary—steadily became the ladybug’s gendered destiny in many parts of the human world.

Weirder, wilder, less predictable

So our gendered associations with certain animals—like the frog, bear, cat, or ladybug—are shaped by the biggest structural forces in our lives: the patriarchy, colonialism, language, history. But also? Many of these associations are kind of… random. And that’s inspiring in its own weird way. While it may be a bummer to realize how much our mental maps are shaped by British imperialism and 17th-century religious iconography, it also means those maps can be redrawn.

While broad patterns haven’t shifted over time, we did find plenty of meaningful exceptions.

She/her

She/her

She/her

Pigs, for example, may be flipping the script. While pigs were coded as male for a long time—hello, Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf—they took a strong feminine turn around the new millennium. In books like If You Give a Pig a Pancake (1998), Olivia (2000), and the Elephant & Piggie series (2007-), pig characters are not only female but confident, curious, and central to their stories.

Plus, there are thousands of children’s books that are not in our dataset. We focus here on popular titles, but a lot of people intentionally seek out books beyond the mainstream.

Outside the spotlight, in indie and lesser-known titles, animal characters are hopefully getting weirder, wilder, and less predictable.

Where can I find the data?

You can find the data we used in this analysis on GitHub.

How and why did we select these books?

We identified 30 popular children’s books with anthropomorphic animals for every decade since 1950, plus a catch-all category for everything before 1950.

To do so, we first compiled a general dataset of English-language picture books that have been popular in the 21st century. We collected information about books that were tagged as a “picture book” the most times or included in a list of well-known picture books on Goodreads. We added picture books that appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for Children’s Picture Books and picture books that were tagged as “animals” in the Children’s Book Database at Miami University.

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.

We then ranked the remaining books by number of Goodreads ratings and selected the top ~30 books from every decade category.

What counts as anthropomorphic and “important to the story”?

We include animal characters that meet the following criteria: 1) the animal exists (or existed) in the real world; 2a) the animal is an active subject at some point in the book; 2b) the animal has dialogue or plays a role in the story; 3) the animal has at least one anthropomorphic quality (e.g., clothing, speech, upright walking, jobs, personality, uses tools, facial expressions, complex relationships, cultural behavior, lives in a house, etc.). We exclude animals that were only referred to as a group or in a plural form (e.g, “… said the birds”, “the squirrels jumped”).

How did we identify gender?

We identified the gender of animals based on how they were referenced in the text: with feminine (she/her), masculine (he/him), or neutral (it, they/them) pronouns; with a gendered honorific (e.g., Mr., Ms.) or familial role (e.g., brother, mother); or simply by their animal name (e.g., the frog) or a character name. Our analysis focuses on how animals are represented along a gender binary, but this reflects textual cues. Gender, whether in humans or animals, is much more complex than this binary suggests.

In our grid, we only display animals referenced with she/her, he/him, or it pronouns, or those referenced with a gendered honorific or familial role.

What about animal characters that appear multiple times, like the Berenstain Bears or Pete the Cat?

Our dataset includes some animal characters who appear multiple times in multiple very popular books, like the Berenstain Bears or Pete the Cat. In our analysis, we only consider one instance of an animal character and exclude repeat appearances. In our grid, we display every instance of an anthropomorphic animal, even in repeat appearances. This leads to some slight differences in gender percentage breakdowns between the dot plot and grid.

How did we handle different names for the same animal (e.g., bunny, rabbit)? What animals did we exclude?

Sometimes the same animal can have multiple names. For our analysis, we group together the following animal names: cat and kitten; dog and puppy; bunny, rabbit, and hare.

For our grid visualization, we group together some bugs (bug, maybug), some snakes (snake, python), sheep (sheep, lamb), fish (fish, trout, minnow, lantern fish), and birds (bird plus some specific bird types including stork, robin, sparrow, and parrot—other more distinctive birds like owls, eagles, geese, flamingoes, etc. have their own categories). We exclude animal terms that already imply the sex of the animal, like cow, hen, rooster, and gander.

What prompt did we use for the survey?

We provided survey respondents with the following prompt: “In the 1980s, there was a study that produced surprising results about our predictive tendencies. We’re conducting a similar study today. Instructions: Complete the line below. What did the bear do? Your response can be up to three sentences.

“And then the bear said, ‘I must go to the river.’ Upon arriving…””

We randomly swapped in one of seven animals: bear, bird, cat, pig, duck, mouse, or dog.

Footnotes

• 1. We included ~30 books per decade since 1950, plus a catch-all category for books published before 1950. Because we were interested in the books that kids are reading today, we defined “popularity” not by historical sales or readership but by contemporary relevance—specifically, the books with the most Goodreads ratings as of the past year.↩
• 2. In our survey, we tried to be sneaky and didn’t mention gender at all. We said: “In the 1980s, there was a study that produced surprising results about our predictive tendencies. We’re conducting a similar study today. Instructions: Complete the line below. What did the bear do? Your response can be up to three sentences.”↩
• 3. Exell describes the ladybug as “the most venerated creature on earth over immense areas of space and stretches of time.” Yeah, you could say he liked ladybugs.↩