- Music videos, comedies and cartoons are the television programs most frequently watched by kids, followed by sports and adult-themed talk shows.
- Boys are more likely than girls to watch television (81 per cent vs. 75 per cent), play video games (40 per cent vs. 18 per cent), and use the internet (15 per cent vs. 10 per cent).
- Boys' favourite television programs and movies are comedies and are most likely to be ones that recommend parental guidance.
-Ninety per cent of American boys regularly watch televised sports programs.They are five times more likely than girls to do so. One out of three boys across all races watches some kind of sports programming every day.
- More than half of the children polled (57 per cent) said they see violence in sports programs often.
- Television, movies, and music videos most popular with boys present a world in which two thirds of the characters are white, and there are three male characters for each female character.
-Male and female characters are almost entirely heterosexual, with only one per cent portrayed as being homosexual or bisexual.
- Children believe that their ideas of success are underrepresented in the media. Twenty-four per cent of kids beleive that having a good job/career constitutes real success, but only 16 per cent beleive that this is depicted on television. Twenty-one per cent of children think that family and freinds are an important factor of success, but only 10 per cent find that this is visible through televised media.
- Children view TV males as leaders and problem solvers. They described them as funny, successful, confident, and athletic.
- Young male characters use the most anti-social behaviours, and teenage characters the most sexual behaviours in order to try and solve problems.
-Commentators consistently use martial metaphors and language of war and weaponry to desribe sports action. Consistently repeated terms include 'battle", "kill," "weapons," and "attack mode."
-While there were few overtly racist images or comments, sports programs occasionally reinforced racial stereotypes or called attention to race/ethnicity in commentary.
-Women are lagely absent from the sports programs that boys watch and when they do appear, they are portrayed in stereotypical ways, as sex objects, supportive spouses, or spectators cheering the men on.
- Many sports programming commercials that boys watch play on male insecurities about being "man" enough.
- Nearly one half of the children polled said they watch music videos daily.
- Almost two thirds of the characters in music videos are male. Fifty four percent are white, and 42 per cent are African American.
- Female 'props' are just as likely to be semi-nude as to appear fully clothed (in 25 per cent of the videos), while male props (used in 40 per cent of the videos) are almost always dressed (75 per cent of the time).
Source: Children Now
Stereotypes of Boys and Girls
Anecdotal evidence suggests that when an infant is dressed in blue, passers-by say how smart he looks; if the same baby is dressed in pink, people say how pretty she is. Boys' clothing is often decorated with cars and trains; girls' clothing rarely is. More rigorously, numerous studies of sex stereotyping of infants are reviewed in [], including:
Parents in one study, for example, were asked to rate and describe their newborns shortly after birth when the primary source of information about the baby was his or her gender (Rubin et al., 1974). Although the infants did not differ on any objective measures, girls were rated as littler, softer, finer featured, and more inattentive than boys. Other studies have revealed that parents treat male and female infants differently.... Fagot (1978) observed that parents of toddlers reacted differently to boys' and girls' behaviors. Parents responded more positively to girls than boys when the toddlers played with dolls, and more critically to girls than boys when the toddlers engaged in large motor activity [, page 502,].
Expecting different behavior from boys and girls can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: If one sort of behavior is expected and encouraged, the child will be more likely to continue it.
Children also have been shown to have formed sexual stereotypes as early as at two years old [Weinraub et al 1983, page 33]. For example,
Preschool children also have a good grasp of adult-validated sex-stereotyped beliefs about children's behavior. When asked in an interview-like situation which of two paper dolls --- `Michael' or `Lisa' --- would like to do certain activities in nursery school, end up in certain future roles, and have certain character traits, children to years old showed an impressive depth of knowledge (Kuhn, Nash, & Brucken, 1978). Children believe that girls like to play with dolls, help mother, cook dinner, clean house, talk a lot, never hit, and say `I need some help'; they also believe that boys like to play with cars, help father, build things, and say `I can hit you' [, page 34,].
The careers that children imagine for males and females are influenced by sex stereotypes. By the age of three years, most children ``know that girls will grow up to clean the house, be a nurse, or be a teacher, and boys will grow up to `be boss''' [, page 38,]. These stereotypes affect the careers that children picture for themselves:
Even preschool children express future aspirations along sex-stereotyped lines. Both preschool and elementary school girls choose a parenting role significantly more often than boys (Looft, 1971; Vondracek & Kirchner, 1974). In addition, the range of occupational choice is more restricted for girls, with nurse and teacher being the most popular answers (Vondracek and Kirchner, 1974; Beuf, 1974). Boys' choices include more action oriented occupations (police officer, sports superstar) and more prestigious careers (doctor, public servant, pilot).
Taking the question one step further, Beuf (1974) asked children 3 to 6 years of age what they would do if they were of the other sex. Approximately 70 percent of the children replied with a job considered appropriate for the imagined sex. More interestingly, boys frequently imagined themselves as nurses and girls imagined themselves as doctors when asked, `What if you were a girl (boy)?' Several girls confided that they really would prefer to be doctors rather than nurses when they grew up, but couldn't because they were girls [, page 44,].
Thus, from an early age, girls and boys learn to think of most careers as being appropriate for either men or women but not both. This will influence not just their career choice but how they view males and females aspiring to ``inappropriate'' roles.
Unfortunately, these stereotypes are so pervasive that it is difficult for unprejudiced parents to prevent their children from accepting the stereotypes:
- A female computer scientist told me:
We ... have a rather non-traditional household, and I'm surprised at how traditional my two daughters seem to be turning out.
Both my husband and I work full-time, but when we are home, [John] does almost all the cooking (I make a meal maybe once every three weeks), he cleans up after himself while cooking so I don't do much of the cleaning in the kitchen, I do the laundry (sometimes), and we let everything else go until a friend comes to clean our house and dig us out from under the laundry I never can seem to get to....
[Once,] I asked my 5-year-old who did most of the work around the house, me or her daddy. She said ``you''. Now, this kid is totally guileless --- she has not learned yet how to say one thing to one person and another to another, so I'm sure she wasn't just telling me this because I was the one who asked the question. So I said, ``What kind of work do I do around the house? In the living room, in the kitchen?'' She said, ``You clean the kitchen.'' I couldn't believe it! I might have believed her if she said I occasionally picked up in the living room --- but cleaned the kitchen? Her dad's domain? Where did that come from????
When our daughter was very young --- about 3 years old --- we audiotaped an interview about what she would be when she grew up. After mentioning a number of possibilities my wife said, `What about a doctor?' Jessica replied, `Yeah, I could be a doctor.' Our son who was 5 at the time interrupted saying, `I think you mean a nurse.` `Yeah, a nurse,' Jessica said. My wife said, `She could be a doctor if she wanted,' and our son replied, `I don't think so...I've never seen any, at least not in Iowa.'
Stereotypes also exist specific to the computer world. One paper reports:
We have even found that some young children believe computer games and computers are for boys. In one nursery school, Pratto (1982) asked girls and boys aged 3 to 5 to name the toys they played with. Both girls and boys reported that boys played with Atari; it was never mentioned as a game for girls. We returned to that school and asked 42 children whether they thought computers were for girls, and then we asked whether computers were for boys. Most children answered this question. Although the majority thought computers were for both genders, the boys were not as sure of this as were the girls (71% of the girls and 57% of the boys). Of the minority, more children thought computers were for boys only (14% of the boys and 11% of the girls) than thought computers were for girls only (7% of the boys and 4% of the girls) [, page 456,].
The point of this section can be illustrated by the following incident:
A group of parents arranged a tour of a hospital for a group of twenty children: ten boys and ten girls. At the end of the tour, hospital officials presented each child with a cap: doctors' caps for the boys, nurses' caps for the girls. The parents, outraged at this sexism, went to see the hospital administration. They were promised that in the future, this would be corrected. The next year, a similar tour was arranged, and at the end, the parents came by to pick up their children. What did they find, but the exact same thing --- all the boys had on doctors' hats, all the girls had on nurses' hats! Steaming, they stormed up to the director's office and demanded an explanation. The director gently told them, `But it was totally different this year: We offered them all whichever hat they wanted'" [, page 156,].