The case of the missing girls: distribution of gender roles in Indian children’s television programming

Children’s programming is booming in India with children having increased access to television. Given that television is a powerful socializing agent, this study seeks to identify how gender is being represented in it using content analysis. The gender and role of 826 major characters across 89 programmes, which were telecast on 11 channels during the evenings, was analysed. The results show that 91.01% of all the programmes were animated. There was a gender bias in the programme titles, as the majority contained only male or gender-neutral names. Males (74.94%) outnumber females (25.06%) across all channels, irrespective of their target audience. More males than females were cast in all the character roles except in the role of the protagonist’s family member, where both genders were cast equally. The underrepresentation of females in some character roles also veered towards 100% on certain channels. Overall, most programmes seem oriented towards boys than girls.