"The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she believes she has in life..."

[Mmmango]

...And the more hours a boy watches, the more sexist his views become."

Interview with Geena Davis in the Wall Street Journal

I have quite mixed feelings about the article actually, she seems to have very strong evidence that there are serious problems with kids' TV, but then she just says, "Well, no one knew about it before. Now we've told them it'll all be sorted by 2015". What's that about?

I've emailed Ben Walsh at the Independent.

you're right, we need to know about commissioning criteria.

is our demand that gender equality be written into those criteria if they're not already?

Of Mice and fucking Men grrrrrrrrrrr

basically in education they've found that whatever they do to improve boys' outcomes may affect boys but just about all interventions benefit girls more so it's almost as though they're looking for something to disadvantage girls (it's OK guys, there's already something doing that - it's called society)

that's really interesting StayFrosty.

we must get Viv Groskop on board too then: if her dd was 17 months in 2007 she will be just the letter-writing age now....

Do you think they will reply to my dd, 'Dear SethsDD, the reason why there are more boys than girls on CBeebies is because boys won't watch girls but girls will watch boys?' I can't see her being very impressed with that one.

Thing is, I think the man in the street (so to speak) wouldn't buy that and will have some sympathy for the view that it should be numerically equal (though he would object to the idea that we achieve this via quotas). The man in the street, in my opinion, will buy the line that men are more visible in public life because lots of women want to be at home with the babies and that skews the figures, but when it comes to CBeebies and we go 'Most of this is animation FFS! They're made of Plasticene!' I think he would support simple equality.

I think the trouble is that most mainstream culture for children replicates sexist assumptions, and just having equal numbers of men and women or boys and girls doesn't necessarily deal with that.

Adverts are definitely particularly bad on assuming gender roles.

My solution would be to turn the TV off more, especially the advert channels, and make sure the dds get some good bracing girl role models in tv/film/books etc. Which isn't that hard, I think, there are good films and books out there, some are noted on this thread. And also sometimes I watch tv with them and we talk about these things - my older two are very aware of gender roles at 11 and 9, they can spot a sexist assumption at 10 paces now.

Interesting about GCSE English - thinking about it I can't remember studying a single female author at school (and yes we did Of Mice and Men and the war poetry too!) and of course Shakespeare, but not even one woman that I can remember...

no, the numbers aren't the only issue Fennel, I agree, and that's why the suggested list of demands I put below included one about non-stereotypical representations.

but the numbers issue makes sense to focus on for a campaign because it is so simple and unarguable, and it is a sine qua non: no matter how good the representations of girls are, if they are on less than boys they will still get the message they are less important.

What frustrates me is that actually CBeebies is a very good channel in most other respects, so if we say 'oh, we'll just stop watching it' then all that work that they do to make it great gets wasted. If it was all-round shit I wouldn't mind so much because we would not be watching it anyway, but it's actually not.

and the fact that dd would rather watch Milkshake because it has more girls on, when that way we get all the awful adverts - that's a great pity.

Whatever happened to She-Ra and all the Ninja girls?
... I haven't watched kids' TV for years. Has it become more stereotyped? Or is this mostly American TV?

yes indeed re Auntie Mabel.
that bloody poo episode has cost us a fortune in bloomin' toilet unblocking.

Let's not forget the role of the retailers who sell licensed products in other categories.
It is extremely expensive to make TV and the broadcast fees alone don't allow the production companies to break even. Broadly speaking (there may be occasional exceptions) a brand will only survive as a TV programme, repeatedly commissioned, if there is revenue from toys, books, and all the secondary categories (clothing etc) as well. These items are mostly sold in mainstream retailers like Toys R Us whose business model is to sell by shrieking GENDER. It is very hard to position a non-gender stereotyped brand in a mass market retailer, because they have a boy's aisle and a girls' aisle and they've found that anything not shrieking GIRL or BOY can't compete in either.

What this means, coming back to TV, is that you have a bunch of people sitting around a table in XYZ productions, reading scripts and looking at visuals of potential characters and sets, and someone saying " we can't make this a cross-category licensing proposition unless it's a boys' brand or a girls' brand. That means we won't break even, let alone have the money to re-commission. So either we bring in the pink and sparkly, or the tanks."

This makes a lot of the creatives around the table at XYZ Productions very sad, and they say things like "but I was a little girl / boy and I loved things that were a bit more interesting, and why do we want this to be just another me-too brand, which doesn't guarantee success anyway, and my son / daughter would love it if..." they don't get anywhere because everyone knows that they are a irrelevant demographic who don't spend £500 in TRU twice a year and currying favour with the parents who buy their children hand made puppets from Finland for Christmas is not going to make enough money to keep the doors of XYZ Productions open,

That's the production companies. I agree the BBC's public service remit gives them a different responsibility and they should have ways of putting pressure on that can equal or outweigh the pressure of TRU in some cases.

I wonder if / how:

the strongly skewed consumer products retail environment could be changed;

TV could be made more cheaply to free itself from the need to succeed in licensed product (lots of very interesting subtle TV can be very successful in terms of viewing figures but because no kids have the will to wear something that weird or quirky as a t-shirt, or play with the toy in the playground, it makes no licensing money - if only these properties could financially make it as TV only)
?

Sorry that was v v long but it's my world and I think about it a lot

that's very interesting Vezzie.
it explains why Dora-on-tv is pretty good and Dora-in-the-shops is a flipping princess.

Clearly dd should be picketing Toys R Us with her 'Boys can wear pink, girls can wear blue' chant. It would be a big ask to get them to behave differently though.

I think the BBC's public service remit is key. They have to buy what's out there, so I am prepared to forgive them for buying in certain programmes. But then they should be using the homegrown, non-money-making shows as a way to counteract the sexism of what they buy.

I am still convinced that if you ask a lot of ordinary, non-feminism-supporting mums and dads, they would say 'yes of course there should be the same amount of girls and boys on the screen.'

This is all so depressing. Yes, Vezzie that makes perfect sense. And Seth, I had noticed that Dora toys were just awful. It all makes sense. 'Boys' and 'Girls' isles in shops make my blood boil. Why can't children just be children?

Long ago, I enforced a house rule that adverts must be muted.

good idea to mute the adverts. you can also watch a lot of the channel 5 programmes on the website - use firefox and install adblock - and you avoid ads completely that way. of course bbc iplayer doesn't have them in the first place, unless you count the programmes as adverts themselves (for the licensed product).

agree that ghibli stuff is great too.

seth, do you really think that "normal" people would see equal numbers as a no-brainer? I think many would be all "who cares, it's not as if girls can't watch "boys'" programming so what is the problem?" would like to be wrong on that tho.

Dora is a very good and particularly extreme example of "TRU-isation" of a brand in toy. the master toy licensee is Fisher Price, who are a finely honed global juggernaut of mass market toy manufacture. The brand DNA is almost irrelevant to them when they get to development. They almost casually pick brands up and use them on whatever product they like (= whatever their vast research machine is showing will be profitable), in the same way they buy raw materials.

another thing to bear in mind is that plastic toy manufacture requires tooling, which is expensive, which requires all development to have as great a global reach as possible, and will cater primarily to the most profitable market. So if, for example, there is a European territory that would quite like to see Dora as true Explorer in toy, and is a bit squeamish about everything being pink fairy castles, that territory is commercially irrelevant if the brand is strong in pink fairy castles in the massive North American and Latin American territories. (Speculation on my part - I have no insider knowledge of Dora)

Engelbert - good point about the defensiveness.
Without wanting to be judgey - and lord knows, dd knows everything about Peppa Pig and Iggle Piggle - I think we should be aware that the constant availability of TV is new (relatively) and we don't really know what happens if you have it on all the time.
I suppose I am thinking that it's equivalent to people saying "it used to be fine to drink in pregnancy, now the health police want to ban everything" - well we aren't comparing like with like - when my mum was pregnant I bet it was very unusual for a woman to drink 20 units a week and the odd small glass at a dinner party really isn't a problem. Similarly when we were children nobody rationed tv because there was hardly any of the stuff on (or when I was a child, admittedly a million years ago)
I know this is more general than just the gender issues but I see it being all wrapped up in: issues arising from unchecked late capitalism that people get very narky if you mention because heaven knows life is hard enough