Male characters are 19 times more frequent than female characters in stories AI writes for children

Gender gap in AI-generated children's animal tales

According to НВ — Техно: As AI tools become a bigger part of children's entertainment, their character choices carry more weight. A University of Washington study found a clear gender gap in AI-generated children's animal tales. The researchers analyzed 23,800 texts produced by six different AI models. Female characters showed up in only 2% of the stories, while male characters appeared in 41%. In the remaining 57%, the animals were not assigned a gender.

Published on August 13, the analysis looked at responses from Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5, GPT-4o, GPT-5.1, Mistral Medium, and Olmo 3. Male animal characters turned up in 9,673 stories, making male animals nearly 19 times more common than female animals. Gemini and GPT-5.1 were the biggest contributors to this imbalance, generating 63% and 65% of all male characters, respectively. Claude offered the highest percentage of female characters, at 4%.

How children's books compare

A review of 300 popular children's books confirmed that male animal characters are about twice as common as female animal characters in human-authored stories. The AI models also avoided defining gender by using 'it' or calling the character 'the animal.' They used 'they/them' pronouns only twice, whereas human responses to the same prompts used those pronouns about 3 percent of the time.

The researchers link these results to the training data behind language models. They also point out that children's stories help form early ideas about gender and gender roles. As a result, stories generated by AI could influence how younger generations think about gender.

The authors say that AI creating content for children may be reinforcing existing gender stereotypes, which could have a negative effect on how children develop their worldview.

Gender disparities in media and literature are becoming a more urgent topic in education and child development. This study's findings underscore the need for different approaches when creating children's content.