The professional aspirations for fe-male characters thus become an oppor-tunity for ridicule within situation com-edies.

Dow demonstrates how the character’s qualities bring her career success while they also cripple her ability to sustain a relationship and start a family

Roles for female characters in early sitcoms were domestic ones, such as housekeeper and child care-taker

“The point of the hegemonic perspective is not that television never changes—it clearly does—but that it is less progressive than we think. The medium adjusts to social change in a manner that simultaneously contradicts or undercuts a progressive premise”

The comedy allows the genre to address taboo subjects through the show’s hu-mor and story lines. While the potential exists for commenting on and possibly even changing how these ideas get rep-resented, the situation comedy instead mostly reinforces the hegemonic under-pinnings and thus the status quo

The three main female characters do appear in the work situations at different times, but their locations remain primarily in the domestic ones.

Sitcoms fall into two broad types: domestic comedies and workplace comedies

The valuing of female attractiveness becomes the fourth theme. Steinke ana-lyzes filmic representations of how fe-male scientists are represented as attrac-tive, stylish, and fashionable (39). What the the naïve expert lacks in knowledge she makes up for in appearance (Flicker 312).

Female scientists also struggle to engage in romantic relation-ships. Flicker refers to the lonely hero-ine, or the woman who exhibits extreme competence in her work yet still suffers from the lack of recognition or romance (315–16). In the end, though, a female scientist only can succeed at home life or work life, but not both

Even within these teams, the female scientists do experience chal-lenges and dismissals from their male colleagues

plain how female scientists’ capabilities get downplayed while their ineptitude gets played up in professional settings, sometimes highlighting their lack of skills (359). Flicker calls these women “the naïve expert;” these naïve experts might make some contributions to sci-ence, but their emotions become part of the problems in dramatic arcs

scientists were more likely to be male than female and were more likely to be white than of other ethnic groups (761). They also found that scientists were more likely to be “good” (Dudo et al. 762), but these scientists still overall were not as com-monly represented as other professions

he found that these characters exhibited features of intelligence but overall re-mained less attractive, sociable, or warm when compared to other television char-acters (Gerbner 41–44).

surface some challenging and even undermining of these stereo-types do appear, those challenges re-main short-lived in light of the situation comedy’s goals to entertain while rein-forcing the status quo.