“For these shows, the syntactic male advantage was particularly stark,” Vial said. She noted that when boys are more likely to get seen as “doers,” this “sends kids the message that agency belongs more naturally to boys than to girls, even if no one explicitly intends to send that message.”
Gender equity researcher Amy Diehl also said this can teach children to assume harmful stereotypes about girls and boys.
“From a young age, children learn by categorizing. This is normal. When they watch television that shows boys generally ‘doing’ and girls generally being ‘done to,’ they unconsciously register the pattern,” Diehl said. “In this case, the pattern is a harmful stereotype, which may lead them to assume that girls are passive and boys are active.”
