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This study examined the role of character gender in prime time television health portrayals. A content analysis of 1,291 health-related storylines from three spring seasons (2004–2006) of the ten most popular American television programs measured the frequency of male and female characters in prominent roles and how storylines differed with the sex of the ill or injured character. Our analyses revealed a significantly greater number of male characters. Moreover, storylines with a male ill or injured character were more serious in tone, more likely to take place in a medical setting, and had higher educational value. Proportionally, there were some similarities in storylines across the sexes, however, the absolute differences are striking and may have unfortunate effects on viewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using latent semantic analysis, we examined gender stereotypes in American English by submitting over 100 masculine, neutral, and feminine role-words and trait-words to pair-wise semantic similarity comparisons with masculine ( man, he, him) and feminine ( woman, she, her) referents separately. We expected to find: (a) Stereotyping—roles and traits would be more semantically similar to the ostensible ‘matching’ than ‘mismatching’ gender category referent; (b) Categorical narrowness—both categories would be less semantically similar to counterstereotypical than to neutral or stereotypical characteristics; but this would be especially so for the male category , indicating its relatively greater narrowness. Results supported these hypotheses, but only among role-words. American English reflects and reinforces gender stereotypes regarding gender roles at a level beyond that recognized previously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the possible impact of stamps on children as well as adults, we investigated the gender relevant content of U.S. postage stamps of the twentieth century. Males clearly outnumbered females in stamp representations, and the roles portrayed for both men and women were significantly more often traditional than nontraditional. The majority of people-oriented stamps fell into the politics/military category. White males still outnumbered females even in 1990–91 stamps, the number of females portrayed has increased during recent years. Nontraditional, compared to traditional, representations on stamps has also slightly increased over the years for men; no comparable increase was found for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]