Getting into bed, I turn on my favorite sitcom to listen to as I fall asleep. This is something a lot of people tend to do, turning on their favorite comfort show. Whether its Friends, That 70s Show, or The King of Queens, many love a good mindless show with a laugh track that will put you to sleep. Everybody Loves Raymond always does the trick for me. As I start to doze off, I catch myself paying more attention than I usually do. I am too shocked by what I am hearing for this episode to simply be background noise. In this episode, Ray fears his wife Debra because he believes her frustration about cleaning up after him is due to PMS. After discussing with his friends, he decides to get her some pills to alleviate her “symptoms.” The entire episode keeps getting worse and worse, with Ray telling her that she uses “her ladies’ days just to treat [him] rotten.” Don’t worry, it is resolved in the end with an apology…from Debra.
This kind of sexist behavior is much more prevalent in television than we think. We are so entrenched in societal norms that we do not recognize stereotyping in television when we see it. Yet, most know that gender inequality has been an integral piece of our Western culture, so of course it would show up in our largest mainstream media platform. This led me to ask, how have cultural and social factors shaped women’s roles in television? How has this mirrored into the real lives of the actors and their success stories? This topic is an ongoing discussion within media studies scholars and within the world of television.
Most obviously, women are simply discounted in this medium. Claudia Crowley Collins, a Doctor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, lists ways women in television are underrepresented including ratio of male to female characters ranging from 4:1 to 2:1 in many shows, and with that, women almost always play the smaller roles. In those roles, female to female interactions without men in the scene are extremely uncommon. She also notes that the occupational roles women play lack the variety and prestige played by the male characters. Many are stay at home moms, making home and marriage life the main aspect of the female character’s life.
While these methods of discrimination may not be shocking, it might be surprising for readers to learn that their own cultural biases have been proven to affect their opinion of the likeability of the character. Sierra Bray, Olivia González, and Natalie Jonckheere conducted a study that analyzed how audiences perceive female characters who use agentic (assertive) versus communal (agreeable) language. Each participant watched either a video of a woman using agentic language or communal language and then answered a survey containing questions with six possible answer choices, ranging from “very true” to “not true at all.” The survey allowed the researchers to see the thoughts and feelings the audiences had toward the character in each scenario. “As our results demonstrate, even television depictions of agentic women, particularly of those in professional settings, fell prey to prejudice regarding their perceived likability.”
Isabel Cristina Pinedo, a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and author, writes about a real-life example of this idea in a modern-day, popular show, Breaking Bad. Pinedo tells the story of how Anna Gunn experienced this bias firsthand as the actress portraying Skyler White. Breaking Bad received multiple awards for its focus on complex character development, yet Skyler was not given the same amount of time as her husband, Walter White, the main character. Tensions arise in the show because Gunn frequently counters him, calling him out when he lies, and even cheats on him. This leads fans to bring their hatred of the character, Skyler, to the actress and person, Anna Gunn. The situation intensified so much that Anna Gunn wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times, titled “I Have a Character Issue.” In this piece, Gunn talks about the hatred she received online, from things such as Facebook groups and websites dedicated to hating Skyler White, even going as far as receiving death threats. People “attack her character as a hypocritical gold-digger, an unappreciative cheat, and a nagging bitch.” While people may believe that this hatred is due to Skyler’s character, others could argue that Skyler was not given the screen time to show as much character development as her male counterparts. Anna Gunn believes this hatred has to do with people’s “’perception[s] of women and wives… [and their] attitudes towards gender.’”
How women are presented in television has clearly been impacted by social norms and how women are told to act, which in turn, strengthens the gender roles, especially in the eyes of young women. Collins introduces research studies done that prove the effects of sex-roles being reinforced in the minds of children and teens. These studies have shown that “high amounts of television watching are clearly associated with stronger traditional sex-role development.” Studies have also shown that “grade school children exposed to women portrayed in typically male occupations, in commercials shown within cartoon programs, were more likely to find the occupations appropriate for women than children not exposed to the commercials.” Yet, exposure to these types of commercials from a young age is not common enough.
Christina H. Hodel, a filmmaker and television scholar, shows us that gender roles in television are even taking place in Disney Channel shows, media meant for young girls. Hodel believes that we see this most commonly when Disney shows try to hide extraordinary powers held by female characters, specifically, Miley from Hannah Montana, Raven from That’s So Raven, and Alex from Wizards of Waverly Place. Disney Channel gives these female characters talents that they cannot openly display, making them something they must tolerate, rather than something to be proud of. Hodel believes this is Disney’s representation of unfair societal standards, encouraging young women to hide their gifts, especially those that obviously give girls power over their male counterparts. She was unable to find this same type of repression of power in male characters. Another thing that writers lean on with female characters more than male characters, 25 times more to be exact, is jokes or references made to female incompetence. Hodel took a deeper look at Wizards of Waverly Place to analyze this. “In the forty-eight episodes, there were forty-one instances—nearly one instance per episode—of girls being undermined or considered unintelligent by men in that males did not think they would accomplish much in their lives or they considered girls to lack substantial knowledge.” This assault on girls as not enough is a dichotomy to the “girl power” culture that Disney also seems to stress in their shows, likely to increase sales in products to girls. This is known as “commodity feminism,” a theory that proves mass media’s use of feminist ideas to sell products. Hodel introduces Rebecca Hains, a children’s media culture expert, who writes extensively on this topic. “For a generation of girls, girl power discourse has always existed, promoting the ideas that girls are strong, smart, and empowered and that their interests are of cultural value. Girl power rhetoric has also been full of contradictions, however; it has often implied that there is a limited range of acceptable behaviors.”
While analyzing female characters and how they are perceived to be different than male characters is an important topic, Collins brings up how much of a struggle it is for women to seek representation in television to begin with. There have been many research studies that prove that women are not shown on television as much as men are which does not adequately represent the 50:50 population. Collins then goes on to say that maybe this underrepresentation has some accuracy to it by displaying less women than men and having women in stereotypical roles, showing women’s true position and lack of power in society. While issues of representation in numbers is a big problem, the rank of these female character might be even more important. It is one thing to have a woman that plays the role of a wife to the main character, but another thing for the woman to be the main character.
As Collins reminds us, women are often the main character inside their homes in our society’s traditional family system. She writes of an interesting concept about the relationship between the private and the public. This concept is that the public sphere happens outside the house and the private happens inside, meaning that men are more a part of the public and women more the private. The most interesting part of this phenomenon being that “television is a major area where public and private intersect, television brings the public world into the private world of the home.” Because public life is more “interesting” in the eyes of viewers, men are more often displayed. Women doing “private” and stereotypically female tasks, such as cleaning house, cooking, and taking care of the children are less intriguing. This leads to a debate about whose work in day-to-day life is more valued. That said, viewers love to see men doing “private” life tasks, such as cleaning house or raising children as a single man. For example, Full House, a show based on three single men raising three little girls and running a home, was extremely popular because this was seen as an out-of-the-ordinary situation.
Because societal roles and women’s roles in television continue to affect each other, these issues of misrepresentation and inequality transfer over into the private lives of the actors and women in the industry. In an interview called “The Big Television Debate,” Ellen Pompeo, Gina Rodriguez, Emma Roberts, and Gabrielle Union, extremely well-known actors, talk about their experiences in the industry, especially the topic of equal and reasonable pay. Emma Roberts shares a personal situation she faced where she agreed to make less money than her male co-star because she was told “if [she doesn’t] take this deal, another girl will take it.” Female actors are often put in this situation where they are unsure if they should take the job knowingly making less money, or if they should let someone else do it. All the actors said that they often feel uncomfortable bringing it up or asking for more because they feel grateful for the opportunity and appreciate the amount of money being offered to do work they love but know that a male actor is paid more for similar roles. They want to make it known that they “are not asking for more, [they] are asking for equal.”
During this interview though, Ellen Pompeo does discuss how she knows she is in an incredibly lucky position because of her show, Grey’s Anatomy. This is a show that is extremely diverse and has been from the beginning. Shonda Rhimes, the writer of Grey’s Anatomy and creator of Shondaland sets this tone with her cast and message. Joy Press, author of Stealing the Show: How Women are Revolutionizing Television, describes just how Rhimes is changing television. “Rhimes has carved out a utopian small-screen realm where smart women reign in hospitals, courtrooms, and politics; where glass ceilings don’t exist; and where female power is an unremarkable, everyday fact” (Press 105).
We have come a long way from Ray to the credit of people like Shonda Rhimes, but there is definitely more work to be done. Research into this topic has helped to shine a light on the gender inequalities in television. While this research is important to making change, this writer hopes that one day her daughter can fall asleep to any sitcom without fear of being jolted awake by female slams. Until then…
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