Analysis of Gender Stereotypes in Advertising
(Linguistic and Cultural Analysis of Print Advertising in English)
Table of contents:
Introduction ............................................................................................................................2
The influence of mass media in the construction of gender roles .............................................3
The main types of Gender stereotypes in advertising: .............................................................4
feminine domesticity ...........................................................................................................4
men are more intelligent than women ..................................................................................7
women must be beautiful and appealing to man ................................................................ 11
The tobacco industry advertising: connection between smoking and weight.......................... 13
Some modern sexist ads and their ‘Mad Man’ era counterparts .............................................14
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 16
Bibliography: ....................................................................................................................... 17
,Introduction
In the 1960s, deep cultural changes were transforming the role of women in American
society; slowly but surely Americans had been accepting some basic goals of the Sixties
feminists: the equal pay for an equal job, the end to domestic violence, the end to sexual
harassment, and sharing of responsibility for housework and child-rearing. Definitely, there
has been a revolutionary change in society since women began to come into the workforce,
nowadays women not only have gained ground in workforce participation, but also have filled
positions once held primarily by men. If the role of women has changed and, as a
consequence, the society has been changed, then, it would seem that portrayals of women in
advertising have also been altered, but the evidences show that this is not exactly what has
happened in advertising. The purpose of the current work is to examine the way in which
gender roles and gender stereotypes are portrayed in advertising, as well as to analyze the
language of advertising from a structuralist point of view (taking into account Leech’s
linguistic study of English in advertising, 1966). Some random samples of advertisements
from the 1960-70s (the time when the second wave of feminism movement took place) and
some modern ads are the subject of this analysis.
It is a well-known fact that society plays an immense role in the construction of
individual gender roles and in turn our identity. There is a consensus that media, primarily
magazines, film and also adverts were (and they still are) the primary methods of which this
model was transmitted to men and women. Women of 60s, especially of 50s, had always been
expected to fill specific gender roles as cleaning, cooking, or child-bearing; they were
considered domestic caregivers, with sole responsibility for the home and child raising, while
men were assigned a role in a public area.
The print advertising depends on images that function as symbols, creating multi-
leveled meanings that have to be decoded to be understood. In the same way as words
transmits meaning, images can convey meanings as efficiently as verbal symbols can. Like
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, words, visual images in advertising are especially important since, according to Bovee and
Arens (1986: 47), "most readers of advertisements (1) look at the illustration, (2) read the
headline, and (3) read the body copy, in that order." As a result, visual representations are
responsible for a large portion of the message decoding in an advertisement.
The influence of mass media in the construction of gender roles
Jennifer Holt in the article “The Ideal Woman” talks about this influence of mass
media in the construction and formation of these gender roles and its origins. She says that
this creation of the “ideal woman” made and supported by mass media “gave a clear picture to
women of what they were supposed to emulate as their proper gender role in society.” She
states that the post-war era and the beginnings of the Cold War also provided an impetus for
constraints placed on women. Advertising, on purpose, used to stereotype the image of
women, they had consistently confined women to traditional mother, home, or beauty/sex-
oriented roles that are not representative of women's diversity. Thus, women began to
construct their identities around this image, and may still continue to do so today.
So we can se that gender roles are closely linked with gender stereotypes
(overgeneralized beliefs about people based on their membership in one of many social
categories). Gender stereotypes vary on four dimensions: traits, role behaviors, physical
characteristics, and occupations (Deaux and Lewis 1983). Gender roles and stereotypes affect
both men and women, and they may be judged by how well they conform to traditional
stereotypes. Women, on one hand, are more likely to be considered as submissive and
cooperative, while men are more likely to be perceived as aggressive and competitive. On the
other hand, men have traditionally been seen as financial providers, whilst women have
traditionally been seen as caretakers. As we will discover in the following pages, women have
always been discriminated and stereotyped against in advertisements.
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