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Guidance for Grown-Ups
March 2008
Gender Equity in Children’s Media
This Discussion Guide contains the following Activity Sections:
- The Answers to Your Questions
- Problem Solving: Exploring Options, Giving Advice
- Make a Historical and Global Connection: Changing Options
I. The Answers to Your Questions The purpose of this activity is to ask teens to reflect on the media they consumed in their younger years, and what it meant to them.
- When the teens in your group think back to the entertainment media from their childhoods up to age 11 or so, what comes to mind first? Ask the teens to name their favorite television programs, cartoons, movies, or characters. A volunteer can keep track by taking notes.
- Many children fall in love with one story or program, and watch it over and over again. Ask the teens to summarize a favorite childhood program or movie and reflect on why it meant so much to them in writing. What does that particular story reveal about their personalities as teens? Did the characters reflect the strengths of their personalities? What about appearance? Did the characters look like them? Dress like them? Ask the teens to include details about when they would watch the program, who would watch it with them, and how it made them feel.
- On the back of the teens’ writing about their favorite program, ask them to make a list of any and all products they owned related to that story or its characters. If for example they loved Cinderella, did they own a Cinderella bedspread, backpack, stuffed animal, or doll? A complete wardrobe of Cinderella doll clothes? Did they own a video? Did they own books about Cinderella? Music? A lunchbox? Ask them to be as exhaustive as possible. Are they surprised by their list? Why or why not?
- In group discussion, ask the teens to reminisce about their siblings’ most beloved programs. Did what their siblings love influence the teens in your group? Were there certain programs they watched (maybe even pretended to like?) because of peer pressure? Were there certain shows or movies they wanted to see, but didn’t, because they would have felt strange, or too different from the other kids? Perhaps they liked a cartoon only boys watched? Or maybe a program in language different from what was spoken in their home? Give them time to discuss as a group and/or respond in writing.
- Ask the teens to think of a program (or programs) that they felt were designed for other kids, not for them. What exactly made them feel like the program was not for them? How could the program have made them feel more included? Would changing the characters’ gender have mattered? What about the characters’ race? What would have happened if animal or non-human characters were made human? What would you guess to be their gender, race, or financial situation? Give the teens time to write a short scene with a few characters that would change the whole show, and make the teen be able to identify more closely with the characters. Will any of the teens allow her scene to be acted out in front of the group?
II. Problem Solving: Exploring Options, Giving Advice
The purpose of this activity is to foster critical thinking about how females and males are portrayed in media designed for youth up to age 11.
- Ask the teens to break into small groups, with one recorder and one timer per group. The timer allows the group one minute to respond to each of the following; the recorder writes down the answers:
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Name as many female characters from children’s movies or television as possible. Put a star next to lead characters that take action or influence plot. (The group with the most total characters wins!)
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Name as many male characters from children’s movies or television as possible. Put a star next to lead characters that take action or influence plot. (The group with the most total characters wins!
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Take a few minutes to identify one children’s film or television program that all group members have seen. Now, in one minute, name as many characters as the group can recall, and put a star next to the female characters. Can a group member calculate the female to male ratio?
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How many on the list are characters of color? How many are white? Can a group member calculate the ratio? [If the characters do not have a race, skip to the next question.]
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Look back at the list of characters. Write one-word character summaries next to each female character and characters of color. Possible words could be: leader, funny, romance, smart, sidekick, pretty, etc.
- Ask the teens to reassemble as one group. Using the “research” conducted by the small groups, open a group discussion about how females and males are portrayed in media made for children. Here are some possible questions: What observations can they make about gender balance (or imbalance) from the previous exercise? Was it more or less difficult to brainstorm male characters? What traits are common to the female characters? What about the male characters? Do the teens observe disparity in terms of gender? What about in terms of race? Does it matter which character drives the plot of a story? Why or why not?
- Adult researchers conducted a similar study but on a much broader scale by examining a decade’s worth of youth media. Ask the teens to read the “Conference Findings” in this month’s issue of Teen Voices. (Teens can also read parts or all of the complete report at www.thegeenadavisinstitute.org/downloads/GDIGMARTICLE.pdf.)
- Bonus Activity: Ask the teens to find research on an area of gender portrayal in the media specific to their interests. For example, they may want to know statistics on numbers of women behind the camera; they may want data about female animated characters; they may want to know how many Latina characters had the lead in American movies last year. Ask the teens to present 1-3 surprising facts to the group.
- Many schools and after school programs teach young people media literacy. (Teen Voices is one such organization!) Ask the teens to take on the role of media literacy educator and write five tests to decide whether or not a children’s program is girl-friendly. Encourage them to try out their test with a younger cousin, sibling, or friend.
- To connect the previous activities to the teens’ current viewing habits, ask them to find one of their favorite films on www.IMDb.com. Click to see a complete list of cast and crew and print out that list. Making best guesses, ask them to count how many cast members are female. How many are male? Now do the same for crew members. Are there more men than women in the top roles of lead actor, director, writer, or producer? Challenge the teens to ask these questions the next time they go the movies.
Resources
III. Make a Historical and Global Connection: Changing Options The purpose of this activity is to learn about efforts being made to create more parity in the portrayal of females in males in youth media, and the specific role that Teen Voices has played in this cause.
- One important factor of social change is insuring that the voices of those impacted are part of the change-making process. Peer leaders from Teen Voices recently traveled to Los Angeles to offer their opinions and suggestions on how females are currently portrayed in youth media, and how they would like females to be portrayed. Give the teens time to read the three accounts written by the participating teens in “Teen Voices goes to Hollywood.”
- Ask three teens to choose one of the three Teen Voices’s peer leader’s essays to summarize. Can they express, in just a few sentences, what topics were of most concern to the peer leaders?
- As the teens have now observed, one of the best ways to demonstrate bias is to do so through the painstaking process of research and evaluation. It can be as simple as counting numbers of females and numbers of males in certain areas of media. But research takes time and funding and the results must be made public in order to have any impact. That’s why the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media held a conference and invited film and television industry decision-makers, and teens from Teen Voices, to participate. Ask the teens to pair off. Have them role-play a call to a major news outlet to suggest coverage on the findings of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media. They can also role-play a call to a potential donor, and ask that person to support this media equity research with a donation. Or they can role-play a phone call to Geena Davis that explains the impact that the research her institute is conducting has on their lives.
- There are organizations working on behalf of media portrayal of women and girl, and there are organizations working to increase the number of women behind the camera or acting as journalists, but very few share the mission of the Geena Davis Research Institute. Ask the teens to read about one of the organizations (see resources) doing this kind of work and to imagine themselves working for that organization. Give the teens time to write a job description for themselves, listing five or more duties. Remind them to give themselves a job title, too.
- Changing media images of girls and young women, and giving young women the tools to become agents of that change is the heart of the work of Teen Voices. Do the teens in your group know about all of the different activities conducted by Teen Voices? Do they know that members of the Teen Voices staff and teen peer leaders offer workshops to encourage young women to write? Ask the teens to visit www.teenvoices.com and click on and read every single link under “About Teen Voices.” Then challenge the teens in your group to come up with one new way that they could utilize the resources offered by Teen Voices. Even if your group is located thousands of miles away, there are ways to engage online.
Resources
Have you used Guidance for Grown-ups with your class or teen group?
Tell us which ones you used and what kind of success you had with it. Did you put your own spin on it? Let us know.
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