New study reveals gendered language patterns in children’s television across 60 years

Abu Dhabi, UAE, July 15, 2025: A comprehensive new study from NYU Abu Dhabi’s Science Division analyzed scripts from nearly 7,000 episodes of children’s TV shows in the United States spanning 1960 to 2018. It uncovered enduring biased patterns in how male and female characters are portrayed through language.

Using advanced natural language processing techniques, the researchers examined how words referring to men or boys and to women or girls were used in children’s TV scripts, focusing on two fundamental psychological dimensions: agency (an orientation to goals and success) and communion (an orientation to people and relationships).

In a new paper titled Syntactic and Semantic Gender Biases in the Language on Children’s Television: Evidence from a Corpus of 98 Shows from 1960 to 2018, researchers Andrea Vial, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Ruyuan Zuo, Shreya Havaldar, Eleanor Chestnut, Morteza Dehghani, and Andrei Cimpian uncover a syntactic gender bias in children’s television. The study finds that words associated with boys and men are more frequently used as grammatical agents, the “doers” in a sentence, compared to words associated with girls and women. This pattern has remained notably consistent over the past sixty years.

In addition, male-related words tended to co-occur with words denoting agency, including words about rewards, money, power, and work, whereas female-related words appeared more often next to words about family, affiliation, and home. While some of these associations have shifted modestly over time, the overall patterns remain evident even in recent TV shows.

Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYU Abu Dhabi, Global Network Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYU, and lead author Andrea Vial said: "Our findings highlight how the extent of progress in how gender is portrayed in children’s media depends on where one looks. The rising representation of female characters in media, which was evident also in our data, is a step in the right direction. But it can still hide subtle linguistic gender biases that are harder to detect and correct. These persistent gender biases in language are also concerning because they may be easily perpetuated by the recent surge of artificial intelligence programs used in screenwriting, which are trained on existing scripts.”

Professor of Psychology at NYU and the paper’s senior author Andrei Cimpian adds: “These biases aren’t just about who gets more lines; they’re about who gets to act, lead, and shape the story. Over time, such patterns can quietly teach children that agency belongs more naturally to boys than to girls, even when no one intends that message.”

The research underscores the importance of ongoing awareness and reflection on the subtle ways that gender biases persist in media aimed at young audiences.

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NYU Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and research campus in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major American research university. Times Higher Education ranks NYU among the top 35 universities in the world, making NYU Abu Dhabi the highest globally ranked university in the UAE and MENA region. NYU Abu Dhabi has integrated a highly selective undergraduate curriculum across the disciplines with a world center for advanced research and scholarship. The university enables its students in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, and arts to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world and advance cooperation and progress on humanity’s shared challenges. NYU Abu Dhabi’s high-achieving students have come from over 120 countries and speak over 100 languages. Together, NYU's campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai form the backbone of a unique global university, giving faculty and students opportunities to experience varied learning environments and immersion in other cultures at one or more of the numerous study-abroad sites NYU maintains on six continents.

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