Actually this reminds me of an anime forum I used to be on that was so sensitive about this issue (because the other boards made fun of them constantly) they ended up being reduced to only liking shows where shirtless men got in homoerotic fights, because any women being on screen that wasn't a grandma was a sign of fanservice.
there is definitely an issue. not so much that your coworker would get upset or anything. but it is true that anime & mangas geared towards men (shonen and seinen) tend to overuse young girls for effect. they even have names for the different archetypes.
those geared towards women (shojo and josei) do the same thing but they have a different drawing style. the manga guide collection is not using that style.
the manga guides are cool with me. but that does not invalidate the issue though. it's exactly the same issue as men with perfect six packs on romantic novel covers.
What? Its way closer to shojo style than it is to something like Dragon Ball Z.
Shonen and Seinen manga are designed for male-audiences. They can consist of male characters (Naruto), or female characters (Madoka Magica).
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Madoka Magica in particular is a Seinen-oriented story pretending to be a Shojo story. So the categories can get complicated sometimes. All categories know and understand each other's demographics, as well as the tropes and overarching storylines that enter one demographic vs another.
But that's what makes "cross-demographic" shows (like Inuyasha, Kenshin or Madoka) so much fun. They take elements of one genre, and shove it into a totally different genre.
Inuyasha is nominally Shojo (aimed for a female audience), with Kagome (female protagonist) meeting lots of cute fantasy male characters (Inuyasha in particular). But it takes a battle-style reminiscent of Shonen, and a lot of male-audience members identified with Inuyasha.
Kenshin is nominally Shonen (aimed for a male audience), with Kenshin (male protagonist) largely doing battles. But Kaoru's arc largely plays out like a Shojo romance. As such, a lot of female audience members identified with Kaoru.
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The gender of the main character though isn't really that important though. In the West, it seems like "male-audience must have a male-main character", but that sort of thing just doesn't seem to be an issue in Manga. Its kinda-sorta there in some cases, but there's enough manga / anime that break the rule that it really isn't a rule at all.
Shonen = fight, fight, fight.
Wait a sec...
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I think the cool thing about anime is that they've managed to discover that males like romance too (and girls also like fighting).
So action-oriented Shojo, like Precure (or DNAngel, or Sailor Moon) is big. But so are Romantic Shonen.
Most shonen are about fighting, most shojo are about romance though. So the stereotype holds for sure.
Train, train, fight.
It seems to be some new hypermodern kind of storytelling. Turns out that the "Training arc" really isn't needed. But even something as old as "Full Metal Alchemist" never really had a major training arc.
(Jump, which has no women working for it and never has, doesn't actually realize this. They think it's popular because it's got demons and stuff, so they approved a bunch of mystical setting comics to follow it up… like Ayakashi Triangle… clearly women are going to love that one.)
CLAMP also made a scene back in the 90s / 00s by emphasizing the shear number of women in their circle. They made all sorts of manga too across all genres... even dabbling into erotica. Cardcaptor Sakura, Chobits, xxxHolic, Rayearth, the character designs for Code Geass, etc. etc.
IIRC, Cowboy Bebop's script was also written by a woman. Etc. etc. I do hear that Japan is pretty bad when it comes to gender issues but I'm really not super into the culture believe it or not (I do like Anime/Manga, but I understand that's just a subset of the culture).
The manga publishers work by having editors keep the creators on track every week and canceling work that loses too many readers.
All these covers have pretty different artstyles, it feels kind of random and the art isn't great either. Not sure if it's meant to be a parodying popular series or what.
Mostly they look like boys' comics, "Statistics for Nurses" feels like website clip art, and "Surveying" looks like an older girls' comic or book cover for a Western novel.
Could you be so kind and provide, at least, a title of the book wehre you have seen "little girls ... with breasts"?
Because from a cursory image search I see at least high school [0] students in ".. Physics"
> dying to learn about some nerdy subject
Eh? Is this is a problem here?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education_in_Japan
Mind you, I don't know how the other character presented on the cover is depicted later on, but "girl in short skirt" I first thought would be an university graduate age at least. Could be that there's a case of preconceived ideas or "cultural dictionary" involved?