Women in advertisements in general interest magazines today depict women in professional roles and decision-making positions in greater frequency than men.
The previous study by Courtney and Lockeretz, (“A Woman’s Place: An Analysis of the Roles Portrayed by Women in Magazine Advertisements”) showed that women in ads were rarely shown in working roles and depicted as accessories for men, and dependent on men for basically everything. In the study, which examined ads in eight magazines from mid-April, 1970, depictions of women differed greatly from actual social and cultural roles played by women of 1970.
Courtney and Lockeretz’s study has been used as the basis for many studies since, and set the ground work for using such categories as which sex was featured in an ad for what type of product and what level of occupation a person was portrayed as. They did some of the first solid work pertaining to the study of misalignment of the portrayal of women in advertising compared to the real world.
My corpus includes all advertisements with adult men and women in them, which appeared in Newsweek, Time, U.S.News and World Report, The Economist, The Atlantic and The New Yorker magazines in the first week of October, 2007. This is in the spirit of the original study, but with the replacement of The Saturday Review with The Atlantic, and LIFE with The Economist. Look magazine, which folded shortly after the study in 1971, has not been replaced in the market by any other publication. The decision of what to replace the magazines, which folded since the original study, was based on circulation. The originals were some of the highest circulation magazines of their day, and so are the ones taking their place. The method is quantitative and qualitative analysis of how and in what capacity do men and women appear in the 110 ads in these publications, in which, the sex of the person/people in the ad, the product being advertised, and the level of occupation of the person were recorded.
My findings were vastly different than those of the original study of 1970. Several of the product categories, cleaning, beauty, furniture, appliances, and cigarettes, did not have a single ad (the case for cigarette ads can be explained by the tightening of regulations concerning advertising for cigarettes, which means their use is diminished in all sectors, not just news and general audience magazines). But ads for banking and financial institutions showed explosive growth, accounting for 24% of all the ads, as did ads for pharmaceuticals, which made up 17% of the 110 ads sampled. Women were featured in twice as many pharmaceutical ads as men, while men appeared three times as often than women in ads for banks and insurance. I had to modify the original coding categories to account for advances and differences between 1970 and today, because as I went through with the coding and research, I found that many of the ads would not fit any of Courtney and Lockeretz’s categories. Advertisements for schools were counted as institutions, as there were many of them. The new category of technology was created for products such as headphones, iPods, computers, GPS devices etc., which did not fit into any category from the original study, yet were abundant. I also added three occupational categories, because many of the ads in my sample would not fit. The categories of Parent, Student and Retired were added and were well represented. Ads for financial and banks mainly featured two types of people: professionals or retired. However, not once did a woman appear alone in a financial ad as a retired person. The single biggest category for women was as students. Women were shown as students twice as often as men, and it is the only category besides teachers where women were shown with other women and no men. The original study showed over half of women appeared as entertainers, but in my modern sample there was not a single example of a woman being portrayed as an entertainer or being used to sell a product, like the woman next to the car in the 1970 study. But they were well represented as professionals. In only one of the 110 ads did a woman appear as an executive, and then it was only as the president of a University. Women were shown as professionals in 24% of ads compared to 41% for men. The original study focused on portrayal of women in the work place, and stressed that women were misrepresented in that respect. Women were often shown as professionals but never alone: they were always shown with men. Very disturbing however though was that there was only one advertisement that showed a woman as a parent, compared to 3 which featured and man and a woman as parents (the three ads were the same ad which appeared in three different magazines).
Overall, there appears to be a trend towards business, investment and educational ads within the sample. I thought it would be interesting to revisit the original sample of magazines to see how their ads have changed, but I found that little of the original data would match up with today’s sample. Women are no longer used as window dressing for products. But there is also a noticeable absence of products directed towards women. There was only one ad for women’s clothing, a Dolce and Gabana ad, and none for food, appliances or products for use at home, like cleaning or parenting or home care. Ads for these products still exist, but apparently not in this market segment. Is there now a trend towards not showing ads that show women in domestic places? And the placement and character of women when shown as professionals appeared purposeful as to make women look in charge in a business situation.
References:
Courtney, Alice E. & Lockeretz , Sarah Wernick. "A Woman's Place: An Analysis of the Roles Portrayed by Women in Magazine
Advertisements." Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 8, No. 1. (Feb., 1971), pp. 92-95. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-2437%28197102%298%3A1%3C92%3AAWPAAO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I
Bridges, Dawn. "Time Inc. to close LIFE Magazine newspaper supplement." TimeWarner press release. March 26, 2007. http://www.timewarner.com/corp/newsroom/pr/0,20812,1602884,00.html
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