Thomas the Tank Engine is pulling girls in the wrong direction, a Canadian professor says in a new study.

After analyzing 23 TV episodes about Thomas and his friends, Shauna Wilton concluded that the mythical island of Sodor was a world of few female characters with a social hierarchy based on fear and minding your place.

"The female characters do tend to be a bit sidelined," Wilton told the Star Thursday. "The show comes out of a particularly historical time period when society was hierarchical and there was a blind following of authority. I want my daughter to think for herself."

Three-year-old Kate was the inspiration for the study, says Wilton, a political science professor at the University of Alberta, Augustana. "My daughter loves the show and loves playing with trains. There are a lot of really positive themes in Thomas, but parents should be aware of the messages that are there."

The messages include a "conservative political ideology that punishes individual initiative, opposes critique and change, and relegates females to supportive roles."

The global Thomas brand of books, video games, movies and a TV series had its beginnings in 1943, when the Rev. Wilbert Awdry in Birmingham, England, started making up stories for his son, Christopher. His 26-book series recreated his boyhood fantasies of talking steam engines outside his home village of Box in Wiltshire.

Christopher Awdry carried on the tradition, writing 14 books about "Really Useful Engines." The TV series debuted in England in 1984 and a few years later in Canada and the U.S.

"Rev. Awdry was writing the series about a romanticized image of Britain," says Wilton as Kate plays in the background with her Thomas toys in their Camrose home. "They've added more female characters, but they still haven't challenged that idealized rural life that's presented in the series."

She was surprised in her research to find that only eight of the 49 main characters in the current Thomas shows are female. Only Emily, the first female steam engine, is part of the core "steam team," and she didn't arrive in the TV series until the seventh season.

Indeed, descriptions of those characters range from the coaches Annie and Clarabelle, who are old and faithful, to Emily, who is bossy and difficult to work with, to Mavis, an unreliable, feisty young diesel engine that had a lot to learn.

Daisy, the snobbish and highly strung diesel railcar, has been discontinued, and Henrietta, the faceless passenger coach, was nearly turned into a henhouse by the station master. The peripheral Rosie idolizes Thomas and mimics him.

"Research shows TV is one of the most important socializing agents for children," says Wilton. "They're not just passive viewers. They understand it, and it's the way they understand how the world works."

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She's floored by the 30 angry emails she's received from Thomas fans, who think she's anti-Thomas. She bought Kate her first Thomas toy because "she loves the show and loves playing with trains. I'm not going to push her into toys I think are politically correct. People say it's a show for boys, but I think it's important for boy and girl children both to see strong female characters. Let kids watch the show, just talk to them about what they're seeing."

Criticism of sexism in the Thomas stories dates to the 1980s, when the Birmingham City Council banned the books from its libraries. Britt Allcroft, who formerly produced the TV series now seen in 130 countries, dismissed the allegations back then, saying, "Thomas and friends are neither male nor female. They're magic."