From “The Good Wife” and “Scandal” to “The Morning Show”, many television shows feature female characters in key leadership positions. If these programmes are a testimony to the role of women in the professional world, they are also a good way of raising young people’s awareness of the need to combat sexism in the workplace.

So suggests research published in the journal Sex Roles. A team from KU Leuven in Belgium found that teenagers who watched series in which women hold positions or work in sectors traditionally dominated by men tended to have a less gendered view of the world of work.

To reach this conclusion, they conducted a study involving 1,286 Belgian senior high school students, questioning them about how much they watched TV series and social media posts featuring “women leaders”, such as a CEO, policewoman or scientist.

The academics also measured the perceived usefulness of this type of content, asking participants whether they felt they had learnt anything valuable from this content, as well as their degree of professional sexism.

For the latter, they asked the participants questions that assessed their beliefs about the supposed existence of “female” and “male” jobs.

It turns out that teenagers who watch shows or posts featuring “female leaders” seem to be more impervious to professional gender stereotypes. They were less likely to agree with statements such as “women are better suited for caring professions (such as nursing) compared to men”.

What’s more, young people who were more exposed to this type of content were more likely than others to say that these shows and posts were useful.

But study co-author Ilse Vranken found that these benefits were not future-proof: in fact, teenagers who watched a lot of content showing powerful women were not immune to professional sexism in the long term.

“Such content may not have been strong enough to evoke changes within adolescent levels of professional sexism,” Vranken observed.

Several factors could explain this phenomenon, including the age of the volunteers which, on average, was 18. The findings might have been different if the participants had been younger, given that children are known to assign different personality traits to men and women from an early age.

The way powerful women are portrayed onscreen may also play a part. “Women in atypical occupations were frequently presented as unfavourable and underachieving in other domains, such as their family or sexual life, compared to male and female characters in gender-stereotypical careers,” Vranken pointed out.

Despite these methodological limitations, the study suggests that the media have a role to play in breaking down professional gender stereotypes. More research is needed, however, to determine the extent to which TV series and online posts can help advance gender parity in the workplace.