  Fairy tales are a common resource for young children to learn a language or
understand how a society works. However, gender bias, e.g., stereotypical
gender roles, in this literature may cause harm and skew children's world view.
Instead of decades of qualitative and manual analysis of gender bias in fairy
tales, we computationally analyze gender bias in a fairy tale dataset
containing 624 fairy tales from 7 different cultures. We specifically examine
gender difference in terms of moral foundations, which are measures of human
morality, and events, which reveal human activities associated with each
character. We find that the number of male characters is two times that of
female characters, showing a disproportionate gender representation. Our
analysis further reveal stereotypical portrayals of both male and female
characters in terms of moral foundations and events. Female characters turn out
more associated with care-, loyalty- and sanctity- related moral words, while
male characters are more associated with fairness- and authority- related moral
words. Female characters' events are often about emotion (e.g., weep),
appearance (e.g., comb), household (e.g., bake), etc.; while male characters'
events are more about profession (e.g., hunt), violence (e.g., destroy),
justice (e.g., judge), etc. Gender bias in terms of moral foundations shows an
obvious difference across cultures. For example, female characters are more
associated with care and sanctity in high uncertainty-avoidance cultures which
are less open to changes and unpredictability. Based on the results, we propose
implications for children's literature and early literacy research.
