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Humans

Both boys and girls tend to write stories about boys

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

6 August 2021

children writing

School children in the UK tend to place male characters in the stories they write

martin-dm/Getty Images

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

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 .

The researchers wanted to find out how a child’s gender influenced the gender of the characters they wrote about. They also wanted to…

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