Sexism Towards Women In Advertising Analysis

Introduction

In the advertising world companies have a tendency to choose and use images they believe will help to make their product sell. These images make the product look like it works much better than its competitors’ and show everyone being content about using whatever the product may be, but these images often reinforce stereotypes about women. Sexism towards women in advertising has been seen as an issue in the history of American society from the beginning. Women were expected to act out the specific gender roles that were put upon them such as: cooking, cleaning or child-bearing machine. Today’s society has evolved to the point where such discrimination is extremely looked down upon and strictly discouraged.

The aim of this paper

In these of images women are portrayed only as subservient housewives or sex objects to their husbands. Although we are in the 21st century, it is still rare to see a woman in a position of power in ads. "Studies of advertisements in a variety of men's, women's, and general interest magazines have categorized women in various roles: housewife, decorative element, sex object, and dependent on men; (Zimmerman & Dahlberg, 71)." Women have been objectified for years and years in the advertising world and it has been the reason behind many feminist movements. In recent years, though, sex appeal has been used by women themselves in an empowering way so nowadays they don’t get as offended by today’s

Walter Thompson New York. They analysed more than 2,000 English-language films in the Cannes Lions archive to see how exactly women are represented in advertising. They were focusing on winning entries in the Film and Film Craft categories from five English speaking countries: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The sample included advertisements across 33 different categories, from cosmetics to insurance to social causes .

What they discovered is that despite the success feminist advertising had over the years, the whole industry still failed to show the diverse representation of gender in advertising. Some of the findings in the research are (J. Walter Thompson, 2017.):

- there are twice as many male characters in ads than female characters

-women were 48% more likely to be shown in the kitchen, while men where 50% more likely to be shown at a sporting event

-women in ads were also mostly in their 20s, while men were more diverse when it comes to their age when they are in their 20s, 30s and 40s

-men were 62% more likely to be shown as smart and one in three men was shown to have an occupation compared to one in four