Social change, cultural resistance: a meta-analysis of the influence of television viewing on gender role attitudes

Abstract

In the last decades, there have been substantial changes in public attitudes toward gender roles and in television’s landscape and messages. Our meta-analysis of nearly 50 years of studies of television’s contribution to gender role attitudes is based on 485 effect sizes from 69 independent samples (N = 57,542) and reveals an overall effect size of .102. While we found no evidence of any decline of this association over time, it is significantly weaker for gender role attitudes related to the public sphere. Our findings imply that television viewing may strengthen an “egalitarian essentialism ideology,” that is, a discrepancy between the endorsement of gender equity in the public sphere/workplace and the persistence of traditional views regarding the private/domestic sphere.

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