(Newswire.net — March 21, 2017) — By measuring the amount of exposure of a large group of French adolescents aged 11 to 19 years to videogames that portray women as the weaker gender, researchers found that there is a strong correlation of the gaming industry with the cultivation of sexist attitudes.
According to Laurent Begue, one of the authors from Grenoble Alps University who signed the paper, video games portray women in sexist ways as much as advertising, television and cinema.
“Content analysis has shown that women are under-represented in popular video games. They have passive roles, they are princesses who need to be saved or secondary, sexualized objects of conquest,” Begue told AFP.
The paper that was published in the journal “Frontiers in Psychology” summarizes the answers from 13,250 students from two French cities, Lion and Grenoble. Besides questions about types of video games and the time spent exposed to them, participants were also questioned about the amount of time they spend watching television and proffered content. Teenagers were also asked how often they visit churches or mosques.
Although there are numerous female heroines in video games, the report showed that boys were significantly more likely to exhibit misogyny than girls, and religious boys are more likely to develop a stronger sexist attitude. “Sexism on screen can have consequences which are not limited to the virtual world,” authors wrote in the paper.
“Today, 48% of video game players are female and in addition to the development of sexist attitudes, the repeated exposure to biased female models on games produces body dissatisfaction among women, self-objectification, and eating disorders,” the paper reads.
The authors, however, admit that the report suffers from confounding variables, for example if teenagers with a sexist attitude simply spend more time playing video games or if their behavior is a consequence of them spending that time playing video games.
Researchers tried to control the statistical probability results by isolating factors such as socioeconomic status, gender, and age, but they were not able to provide a clear result that video games alone are motoring the growth of sexism. The report, however, has lit up the correlation between teenagers who spend more time playing video games and their sexist attitudes towards women.