Wilson – gender representation in media 

One of the first projects that I was part of was we were looking at the study that had been done in 2007 and then that was around the world. And then we came at it in 2017 and it was a ten-year anniversary. Let’s come back to this study and see if there’s any differences.  

And what was really interesting, when we looked at the Canadian data in 2017, and did our part of it was, there were some things that hadn’t changed, and that was really disappointing. So, for example, in 2007, 65% of the protagonists in children’s shows were boys, were male characters, and 35% female. And, you know, I always ask my students and ask people at events, what do you think it was ten years later? Well, sadly, it was the same. So, we saw that not a lot had changed for a long period of time. And we thought, okay, we have to draw some attention to these things.  

So, some of the things in our studies, you know, as we started to kind of zone in on representation, authenticity, inclusion, there were some big-ticket items to look out for. So, we started with gender.  

And what we found with gender was, you know, obviously there was a lack of female protagonists in the shows, but we also saw some other things that you probably wouldn’t be thinking about until somebody mentions them. So, for example, we found that the narrators in children’s shows were eight times more likely to be male. You know, because of course it’s a voice of authority, so here we have this character. 

We found in terms of body size that when we saw girls that they were half of them were very thin or thin or what would be considered to be, you know, an average size. But we weren’t seeing larger size girls. We saw maybe 17% of large size boys. But still this kind of propensity towards, you know, lacking kind of a diversity of shapes and sizes.  

You’re seeing a lot of gendered behaviors in terms of I mean, 60% of the women, the moms in the shows had pink on, 60%. But you’re seeing you know, you’re seeing men do a few more things around the house, but you’re still seeing like they’re not doing the dishes. They’re not doing the cleaning, they’re not doing the dishes, they’re not doing the cooking, they’re not doing the laundry. They’re not doing those main things. They’re doing other things that are cool, but not as hard, or as traditionally, you know, aligned with what moms do. So, there was a lot of that kind of gendered thing.  

In the same sense, we saw dads leading. So, you know, when I looked at all the data, it was like, you know, 72% of the dads were leading, either leading the family, like they were leading the family, and leading the fun.