Media Role on Gender Development and Gender Identity

There is a general consensus that the mass media act as important agents of socialization, together with the family and peers, contributing to the shaping of gender roles. I stressed in my previous lecture the emphasis given by social learning theorists such as Bandura to the modelling of behaviour on observed examples. Certainly we learn to be male or female - it doesn't come 'naturally' and the mass media contribute to making such roles seem 'natural'. And there is no doubt that TV presents powerful, attention-grabbing images of gender. It has been noted that many boys spend more time with male role-models on TV than with their own fathers.

But television alone is not responsible for shaping people's gender roles. There are plenty of examples of gender-typed behaviour around us in the social world. A special contribution of TV may be to present examples of models found in a broader world than that which is more directly experienced in the home and the locality. Wherever they get their ideas from, by the age of about 6, (even in rhetorically anti-sexist families) it seems that most children develop clearcut stereotypes about what the sexes can or cannot do. And given that TV is not short of sexist images, and that children watch a lot of TV, it's tempting to assign the blame to television.

Early researchers (such as Sue Sharpe) tended to see the media as inevitably socializing children into traditional stereotypical roles, because of the prevalence of such images on TV and the importance ascribed to them by children. However, such accounts tend to overestimate the power of the media and underestimate the variety of ways in which people - even children - handle their experiences of them. TV images of boys, girls, men and women are more varied and less clearcut than such arguments suggest. Television offers contradictory images which can be interpreted in many ways, and viewers are far more active interpreters than the passive recipients suggested by such accounts.

Kevin Durkin stresses developmental factors. In the preschool years (up to around 4), children learn to use gender as a way of discriminating between people. It is unlikely that TV is a major influence at this stage, since the child is heavily engaged in social interaction with family and friends, and since much of TV is too complex to be fully understood ...