Language and Gender investigation

Women in advertising

The use of female beauty as a sex object or as an ideal in modern advertising is only too well known as a topic of gender studies. The 1990's have seen a flood of market research and academic investigations into the role of women in all kinds of advertising for both men and women. In 1992, the proceedings of the Marketing Education group conference, contained an update of the trends at the end of the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's. In 1994, a working paper by Wood and Griffiths from University of Salford, concluded their research summary as follows:

'All researches appear to agree that advertisers have not kept [ace with the changing in women, and still portray women in traditional roles such as housewives or as sex objects, looking to their husband/partner for approval and guidence.

Studies of advertisments that did portray women in more progressive roles found that progressive women responded very positively to such advertisments while women with more traditional attitudes had no objection. This has led some advertisers into adopting more progressive strategies in the portrayal of sex roles, since it appears to attract progressive women without alienating traditional women. Despite this however, Woods and Griffins found that in the mid 1990's, women were three times more likely to be portrayed as sex objects than men. They also show that other researches confirm that in the late 1980's and early 1990's, men were more likely to be the central of car advertisements. Their own research into the 1990's car advertisments however discovered a tendency for women to be presented as central characters. In other words, more car advertisments are targeted at independant women.