Gender Neutral In A Sex-Specific World
By Kathy Tracy
Over the past few years, there has been an effort by many executives to broaden
their demos by adopting a new mantra: “We are trying to become a little
more gender neutral,” said Betsy McGowen, Kids’ WB general manager. “I’m guessing that we’re 80-85 percent boy right now and we’d like to be
60 percent boy and 40 percent girl,” McGowen said. “The programming
for the fall is already in place so we obviously aren’t changing any of that.
But in the last few scripts we’ve put in the process since I’ve come on board,
we’ve added a little humor and are looking for things like that.”
Al Kahn, Chairman of 4Kids Entertainment, which produces Fox’s Saturday morning
action cartoon block, 4KidsTV, admitted that gearing solely toward boys, as Fox
has traditionally done, is not smart business. “We had a lot of tweaking
to do. We are putting in a girls hour. I should say, two shows starring girls
- Tokyo Mew-Mew and Winx Club. Whether or not that’s a girls’ hour
is yet to be known.
“The
reason for that block was two-fold: to get a better girl comp, but
also because ABC on Saturdays is giving up that 8-9 a.m. slot to go
with Good Morning America. So, because ABC is really a girls’
block, we thought the strategy was appropriate. We’re hopefully adding
a higher level of kid friendly programming and the combination of these
[things] will have a positive effect.”
Kahn said that his company’s long-term goal always was to be more gender
neutral, despite the action-heavy theme. “Our thought process was always to get all
the different segments - we want to be in pre-school, we want to be in girls,
we want to be in boys. The question was: where do they air? Some of these things
had been warehoused, pending a place that would make sense for them to air,” he
said. “We also sell programming to other networks so we were going to pitch
some of these programs to other nets which had the appropriate demography. But
obviously when the ABC situation was announced, we felt that since we get such
a low girl viewership it made sense to put the girls show onto the block as long
as they sustained the action-adventure motif.”
Kahn explained his company’s business strategy: “Our road is more toward
marketing concepts we believe have ancillary value off-network, because we do
a lot of licensing. If you look at it from that perspective, you are only servicing
half the kids’ population [with boy-heavy fare]. So, from a strategic position,
we were not servicing half the target audience we professed to be involved with,
which is kids.” He continued, “We are looking at anything that meets
the criteria of: A) viable programming that supports play patterns - either toward
boys, girls or preschoolers, and B) that we believe are based on some format
or thematic success - whether they existed already or whether we believe their
coming from a place that kids like to begin with - and we can build upon that
success.”
Jim Samples of Cartoon Network Worldwide said his network isn’t necessarily
taking a new approach by going after girls. “We accelerated the process this year
because we needed to do a slight course correction. But mostly what you are seeing
is a network coming of age and maturing. Cartoon Network is all about animation
so we’re naturally boy-skewing. But to maximize ratings we need to be better
balanced, so we have shifted. We are still action-oriented but we have added
more comedic elements to become more gender balanced. As a result we have increased
girls by 200 percent. But our boys have increased as well.” He continued, “It
has been our strategy building on The Powerpuff Girls,” speaking
of a new generation of cross-gender animation made possible by the property. “People
thought it would never work but the action was so good that boys watched it.
That taught us that it could be done. It is possible to reach boys and girls
by using the right mix of action and relationships between the characters.”
Samples points to Teen Titans and Codename: Kids Next Door as animated
series that have attracted both genders. “Teen Titans takes classic
superheroes and brings them together in a new animation style influenced by animé.
In Codename, the whole concept of an international kids’ organization
with characters kids would want as friends, certainly resonates with both boys
and girls. As a result we have seen tremendous growth around these two shows.”
Nickelodeon is also aiming more toward the middle, according to programming
vice president, Pete Danielsen. “We are shifting a bit. We’ve
made a conscious decision to be gender neutral. While some of our new
programming some might veer boy, like Avatar, and some might veer girl, like Unfabulous, in
the end we want it to appeal to both. We feel that a comedy like Ned is
gender neutral and will appeal equally.”
Entering its third season on the air, NBC’s Discovery Kids was gender
balanced from its inception, although not necessarily by design. General
manager Marjorie Kaplan noted, “We thought we would skew boys.
But I think the fact we don’t isn’t because the brand is inherently
more one way or the other or that our shows are more inherently attractive
to one or the other. I think it’s mostly an artifact of what it means
to be on Saturday morning - we’re not shooting anybody.”
Traditionally, PBS has always reached out to both genders (in part
because they target such young children), a strategy they claim will
not change. Senior vp of programming, John Wilson, said that for the
foreseeable future, PBS would not target kids beyond nine. “We
have to fit our kids programming in between sun-up and the news hour,
and as kids get older, they are a hard target to hit in those hours.
With our limited resources of schedule and dollars, we think it’s smarter
to aim where we know we have some traction.”