Non-Traditional Gender Roles on Television
In the popular press, much of the discussion about television's influence has focused on television violence or sex on television. However, television's portrays of both women and men may also have a significant influence on children's development. Certainly both young children and adolescents recognize that women and men are filling specific gender roles on television programs. In a 1995 survey of more than 2,000 children in third to twelfth grades, for example, 55% of the girls indicated that there were too few programs about females their age and not enough shows about girls having adventures or women in challenging careers. Both boys and girls also indicated that the images they saw on television had influenced them to diet or exercise so that they would like like that character (Girls to TV, 1998). Images and gender roles clearly are seen and absorbed, as well as body types. There is some evidence that traditional gender roles play a part in children's development and tend to reinforce adoption of those traditional gender roles. What, then, is the effect of the portrayal of nontraditional gender roles on children and adolescents?
In reviewing the literature, one finds considerable evidence that children are aware of gender-role stereotypes at a very young age (Albert & Porter, 1988). Not only are they aware of these stereotypes, they are active in enforcing them among their peers. Popularity among young children is significantly associated with how closely the child represents the stereotypical gender role (Adler et al., 1992). There is little reward for being atypical or nontraditional at this age, nor any other.
There is evidence, however, that nontraditional portrayals influence children's perceptions of their options, although such portrayals are still rare. In particular, there are few nontraditional images of men on television in either programming or commercia...