You’d naturally assume that kids’ TV has become more balanced over time—but research suggests otherwise.
A new study from NYU Abu Dhabi, published in Psychological Science, analysed nearly 7,000 episodes of US children’s television from 1960 to 2018, using natural language processing to track how male- & female-associated words are used in dialogue. The study isn’t open-access, so I’m drawing here from NYU’s press release—but the findings are striking.
Researchers examined 98 TV shows ranging from The Flintstones to Adventure Time. They looked at two linguistic patterns:
- Syntactic bias (who is the “doer” in a sentence)
- Semantic bias (what types of words co-occur with gendered terms)
Across six decades, male-related words were far more likely to appear as grammatical agents—the ones taking action—while female-related words appeared more often as patients, the ones things happen to. This trend has barely changed since the 1960s.
When it came to meaning, male words clustered around agency—work, money, power, reward—while female words aligned with communion—family, home, affiliation, relationships. In other words, the language of “doing” versus “relating.”
As lead author Andrea Vial notes, it’s easy to celebrate progress in on-screen representation, yet “subtle linguistic gender biases” still shape how children learn who gets to lead, act & decide. Co-author Andrei Cimpian adds that such patterns quietly teach that agency belongs more naturally to boys than to girls, even when no one intends that message.
This research sits at the crossroads of psycholinguistics & social learning theory, echoing classic work by Abele & Wojciszke (2007) on agency & communion as core dimensions of social perception. It also raises fresh concerns in the age of AI-assisted screenwriting, since language models trained on biased scripts may perpetuate the same asymmetries.
Teacher Takeaways?
- Be aware of how agency is distributed in classroom materials—who acts, who reacts, who decides.
- Encourage students to analyse dialogue critically (“Who’s doing the verbs?”) in media & texts.
- In writing activities, invite learners to reimagine scenes with reversed roles to highlight subtle linguistic bias.
If our words quietly teach who holds power, what lessons do our classrooms reinforce—or resist?
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