REPRESENTATION OF GENDER ROLES IN TELEVISION ADVERTISING: AN ANALYSIS OF HOW STEREOTYPICAL PORTRAYALS SHAPE SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS OF MEN AND WOMEN

Abstract

Television advertisement is one of the most ubiquitous cultural agents that influence social concepts regarding gender roles in various aspects, craming the broadcast messages of masculinity and femininity through commercial plots and story lines. This paper explores how gender representations in the three areas of household, beauty, and automobile advertisements do or do not follow stereotypes. To conduct qualitative content analysis of fifteen commercials aired between 2020 and 2024 in various cultural backgrounds, the study retrieves common trends that closely relate women to domesticity, caregiving, and beauty whereas they associate men with authoritative independent, and technologically competent individuals. The results indicate that advertisements of household and beauty items greatly perpetuate the stereotyped view of women as home makers or glorified sex objects, whereas commercials of cars portray men as the drivers, decision makers, and the owners of power with women remaining in the second fiddle as accessories. Although some of the advertisements used more progressive imagery e.g. of men taking part in care giving or of women as autonomous drivers, they remained few in numbers and insufficient to disrupt long-established gender scripts. Emotional gestures, voice-over narration and camera angle served to further emphasize gender separations; as displays of advertising are seen to not only work at a level of narrative/content but also within subtle visual and auditory stimuli. This study makes a contribution to important debates in the fields of gender media studies and advertising not only by showing how the traditional stereotypes are still strong in advertisement nowadays, but also by showing the necessity of easy-to-adopt images that would allow reflecting the changing gender norm followed by equality.

Keywords

Gender Representation; Television Advertising; Gender Stereotypes; Household Commercials; Beauty Advertising; Automobile Commercials; Media And Culture; Masculinity; Femininity; Media Discourse