A series of articles covering a new study in Frontiers on Psychology are exaggerating claims that video games can lead to sexism in teenagers. A closer look at the study reveals that the correlation is tenuous at best—it is based on a single, poorly-worded question that may not necessarily reveal “sexist” attitudes at all.
Published by a group at Iowa State University in collaboration with French researchers, the study draws from a survey of 13,520 teenagers in France, who were asked about their media consumption habits including TV and video games, which the authors claim contain “sexist” content. They also looked at basic factors like religiosity, gender, age, and socioeconomic status.
The study’s authors cite decade-old claims that “women are generally underrepresented in video games” and “frequently presented as attractive beings” in “sexually suggestive ways.”
One of the study’s major citations comes from 1998 study showing that in a quarter of games, women were depicted as sex objects. It’s an assertion that’s at odds with the claim, given that even at the time, the clear majority of games did not depict women as objects. Furthermore, it’s a statistic that hasn’t held true for well over a decade with the emergence of female-driven stories, selectable gender options, and independent games in more recent years. There’s still ways to go, but the landscape is far from being a sausagefest as it once was.
To determine if any of their subjects were sexist, they asked one question: “A woman is made mainly for making and raising children.” As professor Christopher J. Ferguson states in his own rebuttal to the study, one question isn’t enough to represent a subject as complex as sexism.
“Single item outcomes can produce a wide variety of problems, as they can tend to be unreliable and we don’t know much about the reliability of this single item. Also, and perhaps it’s the translation to English, but the wording of that statement is awfully clumsy, particularly the ‘is made’ part,” writes Prof. Ferguson.
“A counterpart question for men might be, ‘A man is made mainly for making sperm to create children,’ or something like that,” he continues. “It’s possible this item may pull somewhat from sexism, but it’s possible too that people may interpret the item as a statement about biology, given the ‘is made’ part.”
Ferguson also picks apart the statistical results of the survey, which vary greatly from the hype surrounding the study. He breaks it down to say: “If you had to guess which teenagers were sexist, and the only thing you knew about them was their gaming habits, your chance of being right would be about 0.49 percent better than chance alone.”
In other words, the findings are insignificant, and do not prove that gamers are more prone to embracing sexist attitudes than anyone else in the general population. He further points out that subjects with high religiosity scores showed even higher, yet still insignificant predictors of “sexism.”
Ultimately, the researchers themselves acknowledge the limitations of their research in identifying the actual causes of “sexism,” admitting to Yahoo! News that “the influence of gaming on teenagers’ attitudes remains limited.”
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
