There are definitely portal fantasies with male protagonists, but the ones with female protagonists tend to fit into a very particular mold with its own characteristic details - there’s a whole website about this called Girls Underground, with hundreds of examples.

jack goes up the beanstalk to another world. milo travels to the lands beyond with the phantom tollbooth. if i can think of more i’ll add them

Just wanna pitch my favorite male-led portal story here: the Phantom Tollbooth!

One of my favourite series is a series of portal (and reverse portal) fantasies, and the author (Seanan McGuire) actually addresses this specifically in Every Heart A Doorway:

Boys are “too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

In general, I agree with the poster who said that it’s because women have more in general that they need to escape. But when I read this passage it stuck with me, because it named a trend I hadn’t noticed until then.

Narnia Chronicles

Neverwhere and Stardust, both by Neil Gaiman

Good point, only just realized it after you pointed it out. Come to think of it there are quite a few western male-led narratives that you could call portal fantasy. People have already mentioned John Carter of Mars, but HP Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle, the Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, and even HG Wells The Time Machine would all arguably qualify. The one difference I immediately recognize is that the worlds men go to tend to be dangerous or outright hostile places. The Barsoom of John Carter is a wasteland to be conquered, but the Night Land, the Dream Lands, and the far future of the Time Machine are all nightmarish or apocalyptic worlds to be escaped from or conquered, not inhabited.

In contrast, the worlds of female Portal Fantasy tend to be “cozier” for lack of a better term. Both Alice and Dorthy come to inhabit and kind of like the worlds they end up in, and even make friends with the inhabitants. Heck there’s even a few where our protagonists end up staying in the other world at the end. Girls in general just seem to get comfier worlds.

Maybe this is just due to the way men and women fantasize about new places. Men tend to gravitate towards stories of survival or conquest, of being challenged by another world and overcoming or escaping it (go read the Transall Saga by Gary Paulsen btw, boy gets zapped 5 million years into the future and end up boy-scouting his way through the wilds). In male portal fantasy the setting itself is frequently the antagonist. Female led portal fantasy though tends to be much more about inhabiting the new world and learning to appreciate it. The setting might be challenging, but its not outright hostile. Conflict is driven less by the setting itself being dangerous and more by the protagonist’s ability to adapt to it.

What conclusion to draw from this? Uh, not sure. Boys like danger, girls like wonder?

Life of Pi

Might just be a bias in your reading? I was just having a similar conversation about books with portals/unexpected journeys and the list seemed more 50/50

Just off the top of my head

The phantom tollbooth James and the giant peach Charlie and the chocolate factory/ the great glass elevator Whine the pooh Gulliver’s Travels

All have male MC

I always assumed a large part of it was escapism and rooted in fairy tales. Historically women and girls don’t have a lot of power, so this offers a realm in which they can have more power or one in which power isn’t a systemic concern.

I also think it allows for more fantastical conflict resolutions and a degree of separation. You can’t accidentally melt a witch with water in real life and the imagery is less concerning than a bloody and violent death.

I think most kids also know, consciously or not, that a portal to another world won’t exist. At the very least it’s unlikely, so there’s no real world witches or bandersnatch to worry about.

I don’t think this is all necessarily intentional, but I think it’s something psychologically ingrained in our patriarchal society.

Shoutout to the very fun children’s book Castle in the Attic

Pendragon, by DJ MacHale

Tom’s Midnight Garden is the only one I could think of, off hand.

I don’t think this is actually true. There is definitely some very famous portal books with the female protagonist, which probably reflects the female reading audience for a lot of these books, but I think there’s a lot of confirmation bias going on here. Portal kids’ books with main boy characters off the top of my head include

The Phantom Tollbooth (v famous) The Hero from Otherwhere (not well known now but v popular in the 80s) Tom’s Midnight Garden (v famous, lots of awards) James & the Giant Peach (v famous) 100 Cupboards (and its sequels) Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children The Keys to the Kingdom (Garth Nix series)…

I really think it’s just confirmation bias.

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman has a boy and girl creating and moving through portals.

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King has a man, woman, and boy moving through portals.