> Out of curiosity, she compiled a database of 2026 releases and combed through them, analyzing their protagonists. Umesi found[1] a surprising disparity: Girl protagonists outnumbered boys by a ratio of 2 to 1. Some categories, such as realistic fiction and mystery, were especially lopsided, she told me, with ratios of more than 3 to 1. “Girls are taking over!” she said, with a laugh.

    > Umesi’s survey offers just one snapshot of the publishing landscape. But others I spoke with in the children’s-book business shared the perception that today’s protagonists are predominantly female. The dearth of male protagonists, some told me, has made it harder to get boys in this age bracket interested in reading.

    > The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”

[1]:https://readingmiddlegrade.substack.com/p/we-need-more-boy-b...

We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters, and when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad".

When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.

Somehow, one single year of female protagonist majority is more powerful than 3000 years of male protagonist majority.

Maybe the publishers could start a campaign to recruit more male writers, and put greater effort around promoting and publishing their books. Then we could take those books and market them to boys and say look, you can be a writer too.