GENDER AND

THE MASS
MEDIA

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GENDER
• Is when women and men are socialized for their roles that their
cultures have prescribed them.

• Focuses on the socio-cultural elements of male and female role

expectations.

• Refers to socially learned behavior and expectations that

distinguish masculinity and feminity.
MASS MEDIA
• Mass media consists of the various means by which
information reaches large numbers of people, such as
television, radio, movies, newspapers, and the internet.

• Sociologists study mass media especially to see how it shapes

people's values, beliefs, perceptions, and behavior.

• The relation between media and social power.

• Agent of socialization
• According to Lindsey (2016), people increasingly rely on the
mass media, especially television, to filter the massive amount
of information we receive from other social institutions, there is
a profound impact on our ideas about gender.

• One of the most documented, consistent findings is that for

both males and females and in all age and racial
categories, heavy use of entertainment media, especially
heavy televisionviewing, is strongly associated with adherence
to traditional and stereotyped views about gender (Ross et al.,
1982; Eron et al., 1983; Bryant, 1990; Signorielli, 1989,1991).
THE WOMEN AND
SEX STEREOTYPES
PRINT MEDIA

Gender stereotypes persist and thrive in

print media across the globe, regardless of
how media content is adapted to a culture’s
values and norms. Perhaps the earliest
research on attitudes about women in print
media is traced to what became a founding
document of the women’s movement.
PRINT MEDIA Magazines

The publication of Betty

Friedan’s Feminine Mystique in
1963 has challenged the notion
that the American woman was
completely content in her
traditional homebound role.
PRINT MEDIA Magazines

• In fiction magazines, it has been

traced the images of women from
the emancipated views in the 1930’s
and 1940’s to the “happy housewife”
and glorified mother at the 1950’s
and early 1960’s.
 Magazines
PRINT MEDIA

In 1950’s and early 1960, the ideal woman of

magazine fiction was a housewife with one or
two children (“homemaker” was the less
common label). These women may have
experienced psychological difficulties raising a
family and attending to their husbands’ needs,
but they carried out their roles in exemplary
manners. Employed women were unfeminine
and posed threats to otherwise happy
marriages; and since women were content in
their homemaker roles, they were also
experiencing less romantic upheaval.
 Magazines
The baby boom accelerated in the
1950s, and so did the birth rate in
PRINT MEDIA

magazines. Having a baby was a good

bet for saving a floundering marriage.

Married women who

remained childless and
spinsters who remained
childless and husbandless
were pitied for their
wasteful, unhappy lives.
 Magazines
PRINT MEDIA

Fiction of this period cheered on heroines who, through

virtue and passivity, won the hearts of the men they would
marry. Widows and divorcees were portrayed as unable to
cope without a man.

“The happy housewife was even happier.”

 Magazines

For women in a number of

PRINT MEDIA

realms, birthrate was leveling

off. Many thousands of women
entered the paid labor force, and
the feminist movement was
making headlines. Magazines
focusing on the challenges of
women working outside the
home emerged, some with
explicitly feminist orientations,
such as Ms. Magazine.
 Magazines

Older, more
PRINT MEDIA

traditional
magazines such
as Ladies Home
Journal and
McCall’s began
to include
articles about
educational
opportunities,
employment
options, and
women’s
rights.
 Magazines
Magazines such as
Savvy, New Woman,
PRINT MEDIA

and Working Woman,

geared to single
women or employed
married women, also
appeared, offering
advice and tactics to
women who are
coping with
increased role
responsibilities.
And article topics
related to single
parenting, adoption,
 Magazines
With over a half century
of magazines showing a
PRINT MEDIA

standard of femininity
associated with
domestic life,
appearance, romance,
and dating, it is not
surprising that today the
two dominant themes in
magazines such as
Cosmopolitan,
Glamour, Vogue, and
Essence are, first,
how to be more
beautiful, and,
Advertisers in magazines such as
Vogue, Cleo, Elle, GQ, and Esquire
typically portray women as being
helpless, passive, or bound or being
maimed and abused by men or
animals. Men are shown as
independent, rugged, sexually risky,
and dominant over women and other
men (Stankiewicz, 2008; Leonard and
Ashley, 2012).
ADVERTISING
The images of women reinforced through
advertisements testifying to the glories of
shining kitchen floors, soft toilet tissues,
and antiseptic children.

Advertising images of women are based

on traditional gender role norms
(Courtney and Whipple, 1983; Barthel,
1987; Kilbourne, 1995).
ADVERTISING Print Advertising

An early major study on gender stereotyping in

advertising analyzed magazines according to
the number of males and females and the
gender of adults, the occupations and
activities in which they were presented, and
the kinds of products being promoted
(Courtney and Lockeretz, 1971).
ADVERTISING Print Advertising

Despite the explosion of employed women,

the data showed that women’s place is in the
home, they do not make important decisions,
and they are dependent on men, who in turn
regard them as sex objects. Women are only
interested in buying cosmetics and cleaning
aids.
ADVERTISING Print Advertising

In 1970’s, over 30% of women were in

the work force, ads began to depict
women in more occupational roles, but
the vast majority of women were still
pictured exclusively in the home
(Lindsey, 2015).
Venkatesan and Losco (1975) found that
there was a decline in the “most
obnoxious” ads, but advertisers continued
to be insensitive to the real world.
ADVERTISING Print Advertising

A woman is concerned with appearance and

domestic life, rather than with complex
decision making (Culley and Bennet, 1976)

In 1980’s and 1990’s not only maintain these

stereotyped images but in important ways,
gender-stereotyped and sexualized portrayals
of white, African American, and Asian women
have increased in general interest and fashion
magazines (Kim and Chung, 2005; Hazell and
Clark, 2008) and also stereotypical portrayals
of women as sex objects have increased
(Lazier and Smith, 1989; Furnham and Bitar,
1993)
ADVERTISING Print Advertising

With nudity and near-nudity now found in even

the more established magazines, it is common
to see undressed or scantily dressed women
selling a lot of products (Lindsey, 2016).

Car and boat ads typically show

women in bathing suits proactively
draped over fenders and on cabin
decks.
ADVERTISING Print Advertising

Males represent “face-isms”, in that their

faces are photographed were more often than
their bodies.
While females in these campaigns represent
“body-isms” or “partial-isms” in their
bodies or part of their bodies are more often
shown and appear much more in swimwear
than do males (Hall and Crum, 1994)
ADVERTISING TV Advertising

Advertising carries over the images initiated

by the print media into television. But the
images are even more powerful and affect a
larger audience.

Studies shown about gender roles in TV

ads but the results are similar to print
ads.
ADVERTISING TV Advertising

In TV ads, she (woman) is portrayed in

dependent, subordinate, and helping roles
to her husband, her children and her male
employer if she works outside the home
(Courtney and Whipple, 1983; Bretl and
Cantor, 1988; Lovdal, 1989; Silvas et al.,
1993).

TV commercials emphasize that women must first

and foremost attractive in order to be accepted
(Lindsey, 2015).
ADVERTISING TV Advertising

Girls are shown in more passive

activities and dependent upon
another person or a doll for
entertainment. They learn how to
help their mothers assist in
household tasks, serve men and
boys – especially where food is
concerned – and see how to become
beautiful or stay cute.
Magazines for women
persevere in the message
with emphases on beauty, Advertising
hairstyles, dieting, and artificially creates
fashion, “make over” images that become
article featuring before-
reality.
after photographs which
transform homely girls in
to alluring women bound.

Considering the avalanche The bottomline is that

of stereotyped and physical appearance is
sexualized portrayals necessary to attract and
messages of women receive ultimately snare a man.
in media, symbolic While career achievement is
interactionist predicts also a goal, it is
that self-fulfilling dependent on physical
prophecies follow appearance.
(Lindsey, 2015).
Mass media create false
consciousness, making people
believe they exert control
over what they view (and what
they think about what they
view) when in reality they
have little or no control
(DeFrancisco, 2014)
REFERENCE:
Lindsey, Linda L. (2016) Gender roles : a
sociological perspective / Linda L. Lindsey.—
Sixth edition. 2 Park Square, Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue,
New York, NY 10017, USA. pages 336- 440.