Bias in Children's Literature

I found "The Danger of a Single Story" link extremely interesting and decided to do further research over biases in literature. Granted all people have some form of bias purely from human instinct and as she mentioned the best way to combat this bias is from reading a large range of literature. I still wondered, how much bias do we receive from literature when we are children? She mentioned that her childhood was full of stories about white children from western countries; however, I discovered that children's literature is full of other forms of bias besides race and ethnicity. A recent study was done over children's literature published from 1900 to 2000. The study found that gender bias in children's books did not improve during this time period. Males are usually the main characters in most children's books even when the character is an animal. This bias seems to continue into adulthood when a large portion of classic literature have men has the main characters.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110503151607.htm

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/new-study-finds-gender-bias-in-childrens-books/

http://www.intime.uni.edu/multiculture/curriculum/children.htm