Gender Roles on Television Shows

Media producers often attempt to provide their audiences with a window on the world. However, because of the one-dimensional nature of television and the complex multidimensionahty of social reality, such windows seldom offer accurate views of the world. Even perceived unscripted television programs such news broadcasts, at closer inspection, are not so unscripted after all. Journalists' and newsroom editors' personal biases, often unintentionally, influence how information is framed as “news.” By definition, news selection processes, a standard in journalism protocol, distort social realities because these processes isolate information from their complex, multidimensional contexts. Journalists, like their audiences, process information through preestablished interpretive frameworks, processes that are, therefore, [Page 375]inherently biased. Given the multifaceted nature of information and the ways in which individuals construct social reality, news, which essentially consists of reproduced information, largely reflects a journalist's subjective interpretations.

Thus, media messages are rarely exact reflections of social reality, and yet people often rely on these messages to construct their self-identities. Because people's self-perceptions are reflexively constructed, the reflective power of television as mirror is significant. People tend to use what they see on television to reinforce their existing frameworks of interpretation. These frameworks, in turn, influence how they see others, and through interactions with these others, ultimately, how they perceive themselves. The concept of television as a mirror is a central element in many gender scholars' concerns of the negative impacts of stereotypical television gender role portrayals on women's and men's self-esteem and, subsequently, society.

Historically, gender roles portrayed in television shows reflected social patriarchy. Incomplete and narrowly defined relative to race and social class, these stereotypes tend to reinforce social inequalities. At the same time, they give visibility to the social status quo and, as such, contribute to the construction of a feminist consciousness in popular culture and to the mobilization of people willing to fight for gender equality. Television gender stereotypes are thus a so-called double-edged sword: although they perpetuate the social status quo, but they also politically empower and mobilize those who are marginalized by it. This entry describes the interaction of gender roles and television.