Goals
Brief description of the issue
Choosing a book promoting gender equality and that isn’t reinforcing gender stereotypes can sometimes be difficult when we are only beginning to be aware of this subject. Yet, there are very specific questions we can (or should) ask ourselves before buying a book if we wish to offer diversified models to our children.
The Kaléidoscope project put together two assessment grids to target books that promote equality: one is created for fiction books and the other one is for documentary books. They have been slightly adapted for our project, since we are looking at gender stereotypes more specifically. These assessment grids allow us to evaluate various aspects in terms of diversified models and equality. You can download them by clicking the link below.
You will also find another tool to assess books in terms of gender stereotypes in the documents available below, the Book selection checklist, that has been developed by an organization called Access Health & Community.
Finally, this blog post by Amelia Bloomer has several good questions you can ask yourself when looking at a book to know if it is actually challenging or reinforcing gender stereotypes.