Thread by @baekdal

Let me tell you a story about gender inequality, and how a big part of the problem starts with what we show to kids.

We will start with a Disney comic book from April 2020. The story is about the McDuck family finding some coins 'from the future'.

We are then transported into the future to see the future Senate, which is massively dominated by men.

Granted, women do speak, and you can see that Disney is trying to create gender equality ... but well...

So let's do an experiment. What I am going to do is to go through this entire story, and then count how many men and how many women there are in total... and I'm going to exclude the McDuck family (who are themselves all male, but well...).

Are you ready?

Throughout this story, published in April 2020, across all the pages, there are 266 men (86%) and 42 women (14%).

Okay okay... maybe this was a bad example. So let's look at another one.

Also, in April, Disney published another comic in the series featuring Mickey Mouse and Goofy. This story, too, is massively male-dominated, but at one point, we do meet Minnie. Who is interested in her hat and 'going shopping' ... presented as things 'men don't want to do'.

Disney is getting better, but slowly. Take, for instance, a comic from 2007 called Uncle Scrooge: My Eight Million. In this story, women are only featured on two pages.

One is this page, presenting women in extremely male-defined roles. And the other is not much of anything.

But... let's look at something else. Let's look at the latest issue of Disney Princesses (a series created for girls)... so what does that say?

Well, there are some good parts, like this:

But...oh my... there are also a lot of this. The 'gender roles' are incredibly traditional.

My point of all this is that we see this effect of this. From a very early age, we are already brainwashing our kids into the old gender roles that put boys in charge and going on adventure, and girls who stay at home and take care of the duties around the house.

This is 2020!!

If we ever want to solve this problem, we need to start here. We need to make sure that the next generation doesn't grow up to see the world this way. And this isn't just about putting getting girls in more empowered positions. It's also about putting boys in 'caring' roles.

I'm not saying that every Disney comic needs to have an exactly 50/50 gender split. But what I am saying is that it should empower kids regardless of their gender. We are making progress, but at this rate, it will take another 3-4 generations before we get there.

Someone just pointed this out too. Another thing that Disney comics lack are people of color.

Mind you, the question of color is slightly more difficult to discuss. For instance, both Mickey and Goofy are black ... but with white faces. But yes, there is a lack of diversity here too.