The Perpetuation of Sexism through Gender Stereotyping in “SpongeBob SquarePants”

Abstract The purpose of this study was to assess the portrayal of gender in children’s entertainment programming on broadcast television. SpongeBob SquarePants was the selected program to be coded. It was hypothesized that gendering characters would lead to: male characters dominating the dialogue, male characters taking on stereotypically male behaviors, as well as female characters taking on stereotypically male behaviors. The five episodes of the program were coded for the amount of dialogue of conversations categorized as: males to male, male to female, female to female, and female to male, and the occurrence of stereotypically masculine and feminine behavior in both of male and female characters. Overall, the analysis revealed that in the coded episodes, there were more male characters than female, there no interactions between two female characters; in fact, male characters dominated almost all dialogue, and most of the behaviors coded were stereotypical to the assigned gender of a character.