Where have all the young girls gone?

An interesting article in Wednesday's USA Today cites a University of Southern California study on the dearth of female speaking roles in children's movies: for every speaking female character, the study says, there are three male characters.

The study finds that female roles are rare in children's movies, including Nemo, the 2003 mega-hit, and last year's Madagascar, among others. And those with balanced male-female casts are exceedingly rare, accounting for only seven of the 101 top-grossing G-rated films released from 1990 to 2004.

The article goes on to quote actress Geena Davis, founder of a group called See Jane that focuses on female roles in children's media, speaking about boys:

"To just continually see worlds where girls are sidelined or don't exist or are very peripheral to what's going on, they sort of grow up realizing that they can just discount girls and that they don't have to be interested in what girls do."

Now, the reason I find this so interesting is that, as a children's writer, I'm constantly hearing other writers spout the old line about "boys won't read books with female protagonists or written by women writers." And I'm kind of wondering, have we writers helped create the problem here? By hiding our femaleness behind initials and shying away from using strong female characters as MCs, have we unwittingly contributed to this marginalization of girls?

I don't know. Like I said, I'm just wondering.