Picture books play a big role in a child's life. They teach manual dexterity, visual literacy and stimulate the
child's intellectual abilities. Many picture books could not be imagined without the input of women, whether
they illustrated the picture book or wrote the text. Yet a historical overview of Slovenian picture book
production reveals that women have been distinctly unaccepted and unrecognised in publishing throughout
history, and despite the struggle for equality, gender inequality is a problem we still face today.
In this paper we investigated gender inequality in Slovenian picture book production, the visibility of
illustrators and the ratio between text and illustrations in picture books. The sample included 110 picture
books from different research periods.
The results showed that there were more women among the authors of illustrations and more men among
the authors of texts, although there were variations in the individual periods. We also confirmed the
hypothesis that, in terms of visibility, authors of illustrations were in a disadvantaged position until the turn
of the millennium, but that this situation has improved considerably in the present day. We also found that
more and more illustrations have started to appear in picture books, and that there are more illustrations
than text.
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