Male and Female Stereotypes created by Media

Opinion: To me, media does create gender stereotype by portraying female as weak, caring and nurturing but men as sporty rough and aggressive. However, we must understand the reasons behind those. For me, it is just purely for the audiences to feel the emotions of the actors. Doesn't mean all women are caring and all men are aggressive. However, we might sometime get the wrong understanding from the media, as they are most likely to create gender stereotyping while our brain are perceiving and generalizing the things that we see without our consciousness. So media is quite dangerous if our thinking is captured as it can easily influence our thinking, thus making us bias or creating stereotype.  

Article:

Women are caring and nurturing. Men are aggressive. Boys are good at math. The list of stereotypes goes on but a new study in American Psychologist suggests that these differences are illusions created by the media.

Author of the study, Janet S. Hyde, from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, says traditional portrayals of men and women as psychologically different are vastly overestimated and the two sexes are more similar in personality, communication, cognitive ability and leadership than realized.

She bases her assertions on a meta-analysis of various gender studies conducted over the last twenty years. Psychological differences based on gender were examined in studies that looked at a number of psychological traits and abilities to determine how much gender influenced an outcome. The traits and variables examined were cognitive abilities, verbal and nonverbal communication, social or psychological traits, psychological well-being, motor behaviors and moral reasoning.

She found that gender differences accounted for either zero or a very small effect for most of the psychological variables examined. Only motor skills (such as throwing), some aspects of sexuality and increased aggression showed marked differences.

Source: http://www.aphroditewomenshealth.com/news/20050818234122_health_news.shtml