Gender Specific Tags? What Do You Think?

An interesting comment to my July 16 post on Shots at Sea: A Houdini & Nate Mystery (Houdini and Nate Mysteries) comes from Susan Taylor. Remarking that when her nineteen-year-old daughter was young she had to consciously search for strong girl characters in fiction for her, she points out that now she has a different problem. In part she writes

Now things have swung a bit the other way now for my eleven-year-old son, a good reader. I'm having trouble finding good males.

I'm not trying to be sexist, but many modern girl books are just centered around social issues that leave him cold

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She posits this suggestion for my posts:

This may seem a bit odd...could you consider adding labels for something like 'boy protagonist' or 'girl protagonist?'

Now mind you, this dilemma is old news to me. Susan has hit upon one of the hot-button issues in children's literature. In fact I once authored a journal article titled "Gender Gap in the Library," which showed a strong sex difference in Kindergarten kids' book choices. I well remember one of my library school texts pointing out the axiom by which children's librarians have lived since before Susan's daughter read her first novel and long before I first picked up a date stamp back in the day:

Girls will read "boy books" but boys will not read "girl books."

In the name of gender fairness, of course, there are many exceptions to this rule. My older son, for example, loved Harriet the Spy, with all her social issues, even though the characters are primarily female (Sport comes on stronger in the sequels). Nevertheless it's obvious that there are many more millions of girls devouring Harry Potter than boys doting on Harriet M. Welsh.

Fair-minded and savvy writers who want kids to buy and read their books (authors--and book reviewers--have to eat, too, you know) write novels with strong characters of both sexes in lead or major supporting roles--think A Wrinkle in Time or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia) or Bridge to Terabithia. Even the Harry books wouldn't be the same without Hermione. (One wonders, however, despite Hermione's superior OWLS scores, whether Rowling would have sold so many books if the main character were Harriet Potter?)

Still, the old library adage seems to be holding true for Susan's son, despite the fact that some of the best authors of "guy books," (I'm thinking of Andrew Clements, for example) actually do deal with family and social issues as deftly as "girl" novels do. And to be fair to Susan, I've seen many a male eyes glaze over at the offer of a book with a girl or even pastel colors on the cover. The whole Freudian thing about the so-called "latency period" seems to be holding up at least for elementary school boys' reading choices, where avoidance of "girl cooties" is one of the main drivers.

So what should I do? Do I risk keeping boys from reading about the modern day equivalent of Harriet the Spy by labelling the book "girl protagonist" or do I make the search term available for serious, knowledgeable parents like Susan by indicating the sex of the main character of each book I review? I do try for gender balance (a measurable factor), second only to quality (admittedly subjective), in my posts, but since I have to read and like the books I review, my taste is bound to be reflected in my posts. I'm not thrilled at the thought of going back and re-labelling every post (I'm up to 725 as of today), but I'm willing if it's important to my few but valued readers.)

What do you think?