Analysis Of Equally Super?: Gender Stereotypes

The article, “Equally Super?: Gender-Role Stereotyping of Superheroes in Children’s Animated Programs,” by Baker and Raney is about an interesting phenomenon that is not spoken about often. It is the idea that children 's cartoons with superhero’s are actually sexist and stereotypical. The article explains that Baker and Raney are researching whether or not cartoons are stereotypical and sexist or if it has changed from the first time this idea had been researched about 40 years ago. Baker and Raney was testing to see if cartoons are to this day based on stereotypes. They assumed many things that they wanted to test such as, that female superhero’s would be underrepresented by at least two to one. They assumed that the female superhero would …show more content…
The tables showed that female superheroes were more attractive, more consumed by love, more concerned about appearances, and more emotional then the male superheroes. Furthermore female superheroes lacked many characteristics that most superheroes should have. Such as leadership, and focus. Many of the female superheroes also had mentors. Most of the mentors being males that taught and trained them. This is showing how female superheroes need males. So even if they are brave and strong the female superhero is still dependent on a male figure. All of the data proved that most of the researchers assumptions were true. Female superheroes were underrepresented, were more fragile in personality and had daintier figures just as the researcher had assumed. But there was something different from Baker and Raney’s research from research that had been previously done on this topic. Female and male superheroes did not have much of a difference with bravery, intelligence and dominance as they had in other studies; which means that over time cartoons are slowly making female superheroes equal to male …show more content…
I thought this was a great aspect of the study because they used shows from different networks and different times giving the researcher a good variety between the cartoons that are on television. I noticed on TV there are different types of shows at different times. Such as from morning to 1pm most children and public channels show very young children shows but as the day progress the more complex the televisions shows are. This is due to the fact that channels assume what time children come home from school to what time children go to bed, as well as what time do adults get home from work. So with using shows from different time slots it will have a better variety between ages. I also thought that comparing their study from previous studies was an excellent aspect because then you are able to see the difference between cartoons from 40 years ago to todays. This helps show that female superheroes are becoming equal to male superheroes. Some aspects that were faulty were the fact that the researchers only used one episode per series. I feel this is faulty because what if the characters do not act the way they did on that episode in every other episode. What if the superheroes were only characterized the way they were for only that one episode. Another faulty aspect of the study was that i felt the study should have be compared to the other studies throughout the article not just