Even modern children TV shows in the study communicated subtle but harmful gender biases about how boys and girls should act and lead.

What your kids see on popular children’s TV shows 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 analysed 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.

The number of female characters in TV shows and movies has increased considerably, Vial noted, but what female characters on children’s TV shows get to do and say is still sending gendered messages to kids.

Even creators with good intentions can perpetuate limiting beliefs about girls’ agency. “These linguistic biases may seem too subtle to matter. But they do matter, because they quietly shape children’s beliefs about the way the world works,” Vial said. Here’s how.

Female characters get relegated to passive “done-to” roles

Researchers looked at over 2.7 million sentences in over 6,000 scripted episodes of TV. What they found was that when........

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