Mr Predator and Mrs Prey: gender stereotypes in children’s films correlate with explicit and implicit gender stereotyping

Children acquire gender stereotypes at a young age and these subsequently influence cognition and behavior. Stereotypes may be learned through a child’s direct observation of gender differences as well as perpetuated by inaccurate cultural depictions. Children’s mass media, a cultural product, may be a powerful source of gender stereotype perpetuation. This research investigated the presence and impact of an inaccurate gender stereotypic association of predator animals as male and prey animals as female. Study 1 investigated predator-male and prey-female stereotypes in children’s films featuring anthropomorphized animal characters (N = 1892). After accounting for a 75% male character bias, there was a disproportionately high number of predators assigned male and prey assigned female. Study 2 created explicit and implicit predator-male and prey-female association measures and tested these on children (N = 132, aged 4-14-years) and adults (N = 99, aged 18-65 years). Both groups showed a male character bias, along with strong explicit and implicit predator-male and prey-female associations. Children had higher explicit scores than adults, whereas adults had higher implicit scores than children, but there were no discernible differences in children’s responses across this wide age range, suggesting that this gender stereotype is embedded early in development. Inaccurate gender stereotypes in children’s media correspond to explicit and implicit gender stereotyping. This suggests that children can acquire stereotypes indirectly through exposure to cultural products alone and implies a bi-directional relationship between individual cognition and cultural level gender stereotyping.