Syntactic and Semantic Gender Biases in the Language on Children’s Television: Evidence From a Corpus of 98 Shows From 1960 to 2018

Abstract

Biased media content shapes children’s social concepts and identities. We examined gender bias in a large corpus of scripts from 98 children’s television programs from the United States spanning the years 1960 to 2018 (6,600 episodes, ~2.7 million sentences, ~16 million words). We focused on agency and communion, the fundamental psychological dimensions underlying gender stereotypes. At the syntactic level, words referring to men or boys (vs. women or girls) appear more often in the agent (vs. patient) role. This syntactic bias remained stable between 1960 and 2018. At the semantic level, words referring to men or boys (vs. women or girls) co-occurred more often with words denoting agency. Words denoting communion showed both stereotypical and counterstereotypical associations. Some semantic gender biases have remained unchanged or have weakened over time; others have grown. These findings suggest that gender stereotypes are built into the core of children’s stories. Whether we are closer today to gender equality in children’s media depends on where one looks.

Keywords

agency communion gender media natural language processing

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