How Is Gender Portrayed In Television

There is concern among parents and researchers that children exposed to television absorb the social gender implications represented within the television programming. Children between the ages 2 – 11 years, on average, spend more time watching television than they typically spend in any other activity besides school and sleep. The amount of time spent in front of a television screen provides enough evidence to call television one of the dominant microsystems in a child’s life that both informs and maintains their conceptions of how a certain gender should behave and act like (Leaper et al, 2002). This paper will be analyzing the extent of how males and females are portrayed within television programming that children are most likely to watch. More specifically the analysis will compare results across different genres of television shows that children will watch. The genres examined were PBS shows, cartoons, and sit-coms. These three genres were coded with five general sex-typed traits and behaviors divided by gender and by a traditional or nontraditional orientation. The main characters in each show viewed were coded with this traits based upon their gender and if their behaviors/traits were traditional or not. The six shows viewed were “Arthur,” and “Clifford the Big Red Dog” in the PBS show genre, “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and “Scooby Doo, …show more content…
These results may however match Leaper’s results for cartoons if this study examined certain genres of cartoons as well, for example, if superhero cartoons were viewed that containing a central male hero, then the females will most likely be portrayed traditionally (i.e. helpless, romantic,