Gender studies in today’s culture

Gender Stereotyping in Advertisements

Gender studies acquired popularity as a result of men being the center of attention since the early 1900s, and many psychologists have conducted research to attempt and establish that women are inferior to men since then. Despite this, individual studies have shown that women outperform males in certain areas, such as endurance and body language. As a result, there has been discussion about whether commercials impact and define gender roles in today’s culture. The primary goal of commercials is to capture the attention of people and influence their purchasing decisions.\u00a0 In various circumstances, many people agree that advertisements promote the idea of sexism towards women and this is because, in almost every commercial, men are always portrayed as sturdy figures that have a sense of reality (Hovland et al., 2005). Women, on the other hand, promotes ideas and products by using their bodies as the image of attraction, and this supports the idea that women are only to be adored because they have nice body figures. This clearly indicates gender differences in advertisements and in a way it degrades their sex-roles in the society.

Gender Roles in Advertisements

The roles given to women tend to generate the idea that they are a weaker sex as well. Women mostly advertise home products, clothes, foods, and services while men are used to advertise technology, cars, and formal career roles (Beall, 2016). Additionally, in advertisements, men are highly likely to be pictured outside while women are shown being at home. Such silent elements promote the salient idea of gender differences within the advertisement, and in return, it influences how people relate certain ideas to a particular gender. Through time some advertisements have challenged this notion of gender stereotyping in an ad by giving men roles used to be played by women while women are given roles dominated by men from the past. At the core of it all, gender still plays a vital role in the advertisement industry.

References

Beall , A. (2016, March 09). Gender stereotypes are holding strong: Beliefs about the roles of men and women are ’as firmly held now as they were in 1980’ Retrieved May 17, 2017, from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3482589/Gender-stereotypes-holding-strong-Beliefs-roles-men-women-firmly-held-1980.html

Hovland, R., Mcmahan, C., Lee, G., Hwang, J., & Kim, J. (2005). Gender Role Portrayals in American and Korean Advertisements. Sex Roles, 53(11-12), 887-899. doi:10.1007/s11199-005-8305-3