Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret?

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Hate U Give

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The House on Mango Street

The Catcher in the Rye

Coming-of-age novels have impacted the lives of countless adolescents over the years. Coming-of-age novels have had marked staying power, despite waning rates of recreational reading. These novels are often assigned in high school classrooms around the United States and included on AP Literature reading lists. Beyond classrooms, movie adaptations continue to be made even decades later. The continual weaving of these novels into educational and entertainment landscapes demonstrates that these are important stories for growing up.

But what exactly are these stories communicating to adolescents?

This question is at the center of our recent study on how coming-of-age novels communicate messages about gender and gender stereotypes. Gender stereotypes and attitudes can be communicated explicitly (i.e., what people say) and implicitly (i.e., what people don’t say). For example, parents may say they think that boys are better at football than girls. Conversely, they may only reference football when talking about boys, communicating implicit gender bias. Regardless, youth may believe that only boys play football.

Prior research documents that this implicit form of gender stereotypical language (GSL) continues to be pervasive, despite broader efforts by parents, teachers, and other adults to reduce the explicit gender stereotypical messaging in the social environments of youth (Lewis et al., 2022).

Adolescence is an especially important time for exploring aspects of GSL  in youth-oriented media. Teens often search for guides for how they should think, feel, and act. Concurrent changes include puberty, which may increase gender and gender role salience (Hill & Lynch, 1983). Adolescents may be especially primed to seek out information to guide their developing identity and behaviors, and be potentially vulnerable to gender stereotypical language.  GSL’s effects on identity and gender role expectations could be long-lasting. High schoolers’ expectations for future roles and occupations can predict later attainment of those roles (Crockett & Beal, 2012). For example, girls who expect they will attend graduate school at 25 are more likely to do so, compared to classmates expecting to be mothers. Capturing GSL patterns of coming-of-age novels is critical for understanding how gender stereotypes remain ingrained and whether they communicate limited visions of the future for adolescent readers.

What We Did: We analyzed 303 coming-of-age novels published in the United States (1920s- 2020s), using word embeddings (wherein more frequently co-occurring words are visually modeled as closer together). For example, medical words (“doctor”) appear closer to “hospital” than to non-medical words (e.g., “banana”). We then compared the distances between key words capturing masculine (e.g., man, son) and feminine (e.g., woman, daughter,)  reference words with classic gender stereotypes of good (e.g., happy, love) vs. bad (e.g., torture, stress), science (e.g., scientist, chemistry) vs arts (e.g., dance, art), home (e.g., house, family) vs. career (e.g., office, job,), agency (e.g., capable, independent) vs. communion (e.g., generous, caring). 

Key Findings: Feminine words were more likely to be associated with gender stereotypes like domestic and communal traits. Masculine words were more likely to be associated with assertive, action-oriented traits and occupations.

Upon measuring change over time, feminine characters became increasingly associated with agency and communal traits. In earlier eras of coming-of-age novels, gender stereotypes were particularly strong, which may be explained by sociocultural information from historical events (e.g., Great Depression, World War II). More recently, these trends shifted to portray action-oriented feminine characters that remain emotionally engaged, suggesting progress toward gender equality in literary portrayal.

However, this gender equality trend was less apparent for masculine characters, who were  portrayed as action-oriented but unemotional. This infrequent representation of masculine characters as emotional or communal may especially affect boys, because boys tend to be less drawn to books without male protagonists whereas girls are more likely to be interested in books featuring both genders (e.g., Odağ, 2013). This may further limit boys’ exposure to diverse role models and ways of being.

Why This Matters: Persistent gender stereotypes reinforce narrow ideals about ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and future planning. In turn, this may impact the traits and occupations that adolescents envision for themselves. Exposure to more diverse coming-of-age novels may help combat concerns of limited gender portrayals. Educators and parents can leverage these insights by assigning and inviting youth to read books that represent a diversity of main character identities. They can also advocate for more recently published books to be included on reading lists and school curricula. These efforts may empower youth to imagine fuller, more egalitarian identities and futures. 

Full citation:

Crockett, L. J., & Beal, S. J. (2012). The life course in the making: Gender and the development of adolescents' expected timing of adult role transitions. Developmental Psychology, 48(6), 1727-1738. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027538

Hill, J. P., & Lynch, M. E. (1983). The Intensification of Gender-Related Role Expectations during Early Adolescence. In J. Brooks-Gunn & A. C. Petersen (Eds.), Girls at Puberty (pp. 201–228). Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0354-9_10

Koch, M. K., Merritt, H., Inniss‐Thompson, M. N., McCormick, K. C., & Mendle, J. (2025). Are you there, God? It's me, gender bias in 100 years of coming‐of‐age novels. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 35(2), e70036. doi.org/10.1111/jora.70036

Lewis, M., Cooper Borkenhagen, M., Converse, E., Lupyan, G., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2022). What might books be teaching young children about gender? Psychological Science, 33(1), 33-47. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211024643

Odağ, Ö. (2013). Emotional engagement during literary reception: Do men and women differ? Cognition and Emotion, 27(5), 856–874. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2012.751359