Report on the 1995 conference on
Children and the Media
Children Now, 1995
Cosponsored by Stanford University and
the UCLA Center for Communication Policy
Republished with permission
You've come a long way, baby - from June Cleaver mopping floors to Murphy Brown topping Dan Quayle's agenda. Since the 1960's, TV women have moved out of the kitchen and into the boardroom, the courtroom, and the newsroom. Kids realize it, too. Children Now's recent national poll found that most girls feel there are enough role models for them on prime time TV. And when it comes to young girls on TV, they're right. There are roughly the same number of boy and girl characters on TV- and for the most part, no significant differences in the way they are portrayed in terms of their motivations and behaviors, although girls are more likely to show affection and boys are more likely to be aggressive.
And nowadays, women on TV are better role models, too. They've landed the best pay, the best promotion, and the best punchline. But something crucial is missing: reality. For the most part, female characters hardly ever tackle the real-life situations that cause working women the most grief: child care problems, job discrimination, sexual harassment or ... just plain being broke. "They are far removed from the world of reality," says professor Aletha Huston, director of the Center for Research on the Influence of Television on Children.
And when it comes to adult women on TV, they remain far too few. On prime time shows, men still outnumber women 3 to 1. Male characters almost always drive the plot. Most of the rest of the women on TV are younger than the men, more attractive, blond or red-headed, nurturing, and often victimized, according to content analysis studies. On Saturday mornings, females fare far worse. In TV shows designed specifically for kids, only 23 percent of the characters - and even fewer of the major characters - are female. "In cartoonland, all the girls are sidekicks and there's no doubt who's in charge," says ABC news anchor Carole Simpson. And they're stereotyped, too: the lone Smurfette is blond and all too caring and a female Power Ranger is, of course, dressed in pink. "The girls on these shows are a quick fix, almost an afterthought," says Katharine Heintz-Knowles, assistant professor of communications at the University of Washington and author of a pioneering study on the subject.
Some Hollywood execs recognize that female cartoon characters are an endangered species. "The issue of a girl being empowered is a wonderful theme you just don't see in American animation," ventures Andy Heyward, president of DIC entertainment, who is bringing a Japanese cartoon series called Sailor Moon to American TV this fall. The show's main character is a clumsy, long legged, blond junior high school student who transforms into a heroine with super powers. Why aren't there more Sailor Moons? Most execs argue that girls will watch shows designed for boys, but that the reverse isn't true.
Girls may watch. But as they grow older and more savvy, they're less satisfied with the experience. In the recent Children Now poll, teen girls were much less satisfied than most kids with the role models they see on TV. "TV is a real turn-off, when all you see are blond bimbettes," says 15-year-old Julie Sohn. The result? They tune out -- with teen girls watching half as much TV as other kids. Partly it's the heavy barrage of sex -- 14,000 sexual references versus 150 of abstinence -- on soap operas, prime time shows, commercials, and even MTV videos -- that turns them off. Those who keep watching are strongly influenced -- often by stereotypical images of uniformly beautiful, obsessively thin, and scantily dressed objects of male desire. And studies show that girls who are frequent viewers have the most negative opinion of their gender.
Even preschool girls suffer from TV's sex stereotyping. Action-packed shows geared to younger kids have the fewest girl characters -- one out of four -- with girls less aggressive and combative than boys, unless they're evil witches. And these shows can erode girls' self-confidence. One study of 3 to 10 year olds found that those who watched the most TV were most likely to want to be housewives and nurses. In another study, three to six year olds agreed that men have more ambition and that women are happier raising kids.
Yet, on the rare occasion when TV has been used to break down sex stereotypes, it's been successful. After watching a PBS series called Freestyle which showed girls and boys in non-traditional roles, kids showed more acceptance of boys as helpers, girls as leaders, and girls doing mechanical tasks. But such shows remain rare experiments. The new and few female characters on Saturday morning have had little impact, so far. In a recent survey, school age girls had a hard time coming up with more than three female heroines. Marilyn Monroe, who's been dead for 30 years; Wonder Woman "because of the sparkles on her dress"; and Julia "but-I-could-never-look-like-her" Roberts. So while progress is being made, too often, as Professor Heintz-Knowles points out, "the message coming from the screen is that girls are not valued in our culture."
