The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media recently published its annual See Jane study, “See It Be It: What Children Are Seeing On TV,” which looks at inclusion and representation of six groups (women, people of color, queer people, people with disabilities, people ages 50 and older, and people who are fat) in programming that is popular with children as well as currently in production and made for children.
We added current programming for the first time to understand how the entertainment industry is responding to calls for more diverse and dynamic children’s content. This analysis of inclusion and representation will serve as a benchmark to track further change and progress in television media made for children.
Is Gender Parity in Children’s TV Slipping?
In past reports, we have found gender parity among lead characters when analyzing popular children’s television. But this year, we report that in the 2021 season of TV made for children, most lead characters are male (61.6%). So, what happened? There are two important factors that can help us see this issue more clearly: datasets and character types.
This year, we examined children’s television from two perspectives: what is popular with children and what is current (this includes shows made for children that are currently on air).
Programming Popular with Children
48.8% of leads in popular TV shows are women — about a 4-percentage-point increase from 2019 but still below 2018, when 52% of leads were women.
Current Children’s Programming:
Just 38.1% of leads in shows made for children in 2021 are women — the rest are men.).
This finding regarding gender and leads in current children’s programming is concerning. However, when we look more closely at the data, we find an interesting quirk:
Near gender parity exists among human characters (52.2% male compared to 47.6% female). But 66.5% of nonhuman characters are male compared to 33.1% who are female. In other words, animals, anthropomorphized objects, and zombies or monsters are much more likely to be male. This could suggest that creators are striving for parity when they're thinking about human characters, but are less conscious of gender bias when the characters are nonhuman.
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