This 1 Subtle Bias Against Girls Is Everywhere On Kids TV Shows — And It's Harmful

Even creators with good intentions can perpetuate limiting beliefs. Here’s what you need to know.

What your kids see on popular children’s TV programs could teach them lasting lessons about what kind of leaders girls and boys can grow up to be.

According to a new study in Psychological Science, harmful gender biases continue to persist in TV programming for kids.

Researchers analyzed scripts from 98 children’s television programs in the U.S. from 1960 to 2018, including classics like “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” (1970) and modern shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants” (2002), “Dora the Explorer” (2012) and “The Powerpuff Girls” (2016).

What they found was that gender stereotypes are at the core of children’s TV content. Troublingly, this pattern has not improved and has, in fact, remained consistent over 60 years.

“Gendered patterns in language are a much subtler form of bias — the part of the iceberg that’s hidden underwater — one likely to go unnoticed by audiences and creators alike,” the study’s lead author, Andrea Vial, told HuffPost.