The Changing Portrayal of Women in Advertisement over the last Sixty Years. “Show her it's a man's world”

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Sociology - Consumption and Advertising, grade: 1,3, University of Trier, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this term paper is to analyze the portrayal of women in print advertisement over the last sixty years to represent changes in the depiction of females over this period. This topic is of interest since mass media plays an important role in our society today and it can be considered as one of the major agents of socialization. Consequently, gender stereotypes presented in advertisement influence the way we think men and women shall be. However, since the role of women has changed dramatically over the last decades due to feminist movements, it will be of interest if these social changes have been depicted in advertisement as well. In particular, it is assumed that the portrayal of women in advertisement has been shifting from an overt, traditional stereotypical portrayal of women as housewives or highly dependent on men to a slightly more subtle stereotypical portrayal of women as decorative, sexy, and using facial expressions and body positions to demonstrate subordination and weakness. To prove this hypothesis this term paper will first compare past studies focusing on the stereotypical depiction of females in advertisement. For this purpose two studies were considered most important: These were Courtney and Lockeretz quantitative print magazine analysis covering the year 1970, and Erving Goffman’s selective print magazine analysis published in 1979. Furthermore, there are many relating and follow-up studies that are based on the coding schemes used in these two analyses which provide the possibility to show changes over time. Afterwards, the second part will be more practical, examining portrayals of women in example print advertisements. To be able to provide a consecutive and meaningful depiction of the changes, advertisements of two companies from different years were chose to be analyzed.