Despite the creator’s of Modern Family effort to portray a progressive view of American families, the show still accentuates outdated female stereotypes and gender roles; reinforcing gender characteristics, patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity. In contrast to its title, Modern Family promotes traditional gender roles and stereotypes of women, which result in the portrayal of an inaccurate image of the female, and weakens the stance of women in today’s U.S. society.
Gender stereotypes are prevalent throughout the Modern Family; the women are all portrayed as wives and mothers, promoting a continued male dominant family ideology. Claire and Gloria are throughout the show acting on our society’s “assumptions about women’s ‘appropriate’ roles” (Dow 19). Both share characteristics of family-orientation and domesticity, as stay-at-home mothers and main caretakers of their households, often performing “female-stereotyped chores (doing dishes, cooking, cleaning)”. While their husbands act as the source of income, Claire and Gloria are “neither shown on job nor mentioned an occupation”, strongly promoting this as the normalcy between the genders. Furthermore, more focus is put on the women’s feelings than it is on the men’s, portraying females as more emotional, even irrational, “although crying and whining are behaviors exhibited by men and women” (Signorelli). In the Dunphy family, Claire and Phil admits several times how their son Luke might not be the brightest child. Yet in the