Ambiguity In Disney Movies

In total, between the five movies evaluated contained 55 characters of which 40 were males, 14 were females, and one was omitted because of its gender ambiguity. Gender was noted in order to evaluate whether or not there appeared to be differences in behavior between males and females more specifically whether there was gender stereotypical behavior in Disney films. Males are represented in these films far more often according to our results appearing almost 3 times as often as females. This is in agreement to several studies including Junn (1997) and Leaper et al. (2002) that found that women were underrepresented in Disney media (Junn, 1997 & Leaper et al., 2002). On average each film contained 8 male characters. The male characters in these …show more content…
Therefore, we combined the behaviors giving orders and aggressive behaviors because they were both found to be stereotypically male behaviors and we combined performing domestic duties and primping because they were deemed to be stereotypically female behaviors. We found that males exhibited 414 instances of the stereotypically male behaviors and divided by the total number of male characters. This gave us 10.35 male stereotypical behaviors per male character. The same method was administered thereafter for the remaining groups in this analysis with one slight shift, we divided by 14, the total number of female characters when determining the number of behaviors per female character. We found that on average 1.08 female stereotypical behaviors were performed per male character. Next we calculated …show more content…
Our results with regard to the number of male and female characters in Disney films showed that male characters out number female characters nearly 3 to 1. Therefore, our results support the findings of Junn (1997) and Leaper et al. (2002) where they found that men were overrepresented compared to women. These results help reaffirm the fact that their gender is unfairly portrayed in Disney movies and may teach a child that, male characters are more important than female characters and as a result may instill the belief that men are better or more important then females in society (Leaper et al. 2002). We were successful at supporting some of our findings, but we failed to support the findings of Kirsch and Murnen, which found that Disney tales contain constant gender stereotyped behavior. Our results only show that men are likely to align with male stereotypical behaviors. Women are more than twice as likely to exhibit male stereotypical behavior than female stereotypical behavior. Our results could have varied from the findings for many reasons, but probably the most notable would be the small sample size which did not differ much from the other studies, but with small sample sizes come the risk of randomly selecting movies to gather data from that are not representative of the total population. Therefore, we may have been able to replicate the findings of Kirsch and Murnen had we observed the exact same