Syntactic and Semantic Gender Biases in the Language on Children’s Television: Evidence from a Corpus of 98 Shows from 1960 to 2018
Bibliographic record
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 spanning 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/boys (vs. women/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/boys (vs. women/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 weakened over time; others have grown. These findings suggest gender stereotypes are built into the core of children’s stories. Whether we are closer to gender equality in children’s media depends on where one looks.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".