This document provides an overview and summary of Andrew Sinclair's presentation on gender representation in television advertisements. It begins with an introduction to the topic and theories that framed the analysis. It then discusses common male and female stereotypes found in ads and background on television viewing habits. The document outlines Sinclair's content analysis methodology of coding 167 ads and presents results showing high levels of attractiveness and objectification themes. It concludes by discussing the implications of perpetuating outdated gender norms in television ads and proposes solutions like increased media literacy.

1. Television
Advertisements &
Their
Representation of
Gender/Sex
By: Andrew Sinclair

2. Introduction
 In this presentation, I will be examining
how contemporary television
advertisements portray and represent
gender/sex to viewers
 First, I will introduce the theories that were
used to frame my analysis and then discuss
common gender stereotypes in
advertisements
 Second, I will introduce background
information concerning television
advertisements and gender/sex
 Third, I will explain the importance of this
study and how it was conducted
 Fourth, the results of my content analysis will
be presented, reviewed, and discussed
 Finally, I will share the conclusions I reached,
combining my content analysis and
preliminary research.

3. Applied Theories
 Social Learning theory
 Argues that gender is a learned behavior; learned by observing, analyzing, and modeling
others.
 Portrays socialization as a passive process in which children learn by observing and imitating
others and by being rewarded for these behaviors.
 Observational learning occurs through media sources, such as television
 Critical/Cultural theories
 Focuses on hierarchy, hegemony, power, and privilege
 Emphasizes the role of communication in constructing the social reality, which is the reality as
understood through the symbols humans use to represent it.
 People may know things exist apart from their symbol systems, but they cannot know what
those things mean, or how they are to react to them, except through the symbol system.
 In terms of gender/sex, these theories examine gender as a social construction and ask how
gender/sex privileges some and disempowers others.

4. Gender Stereotypes in Advertising
 Male Stereotypes:
 Strong
 Rational
 Rugged
 Competitive
 Displays authority
 Men are usually associated with the
outdoors, sports, cars, and relaxing
 Depicted in roles that command expertise
or authority (finances, insurance,
professional opinions)
(Pryor & Knupfer, 1997)
 Female Stereotypes:
 Weak
 Emotional
 Delicate
 Sociable
 Displays body
 Depicted as feminine and showing
beauty, grace, style, and sexual
attractiveness.
 Usually shown shopping, cleaning,
cooking, and nurturing
(Pryor & Knupfer, 1997)

5. Access to Advertising
 Exposure to television and advertisements
 96.7% of households have at least one television (Stetler, 2011)
 In the United States, most people spend at least 2.8 hours a day watching television. (U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012)
 There are, on average, 16 minutes of commercials during one hour of television broadcasting;
and by the age of 40, we have seen approximately one million commercials (Pryor & Knupfer,
1997)
 Investment in advertisements
 In 2015, advertisers spent almost $41 billion on television broadcast advertising (Turow, 2017)
 Top 3 spenders on advertising, 2010: General Motors, $4.2 billion; Ford, $3.9 billion; and Verizon, $2.5
billion. (DeFrancisco & Palczewski, 2014)
 It is safe to assume advertising works if this amount of money is spent annually; therefore, we
know that advertisers spend a lot of time and money developing ways to alter social reality to
their benefit.
 This means their goal is to construct gender/sex in a way that targets their audience and convinces
them to buy their product or service.

6. Effects of Advertisements
 Goffman (1979) asserted that advertisements picturing men and women provide
conventional modes of gender interaction and sex roles
 Media representations of individuals influence the ways audience members perceive
and react to members of the groups represented (Gentry & Harrison, 2010)
 These representations contribute to the social knowledge media users develop about
reality and the individuals that reside there.
 The ways that advertisers target audiences is not subtle and due to the vast television
consumption of Americans, the repeated commercials greatly influence our beliefs
and buying habits (Pryor & Knupfer, 1997)
 Therefore, we can argue that society is shaped by suggestions of television advertisers
who want to control what we should buy, how we should look, how we should act, and
who should do what (Pryor & Knupfer, 1997)
 In other words, they create and maintain gender stereotypes in society

8. Reasoning & Explanation of My Study
 Media and advertisements have more control than we, the viewers, would like to believe
 They create and maintain gender stereotypes that are communicated to us and, thus, instilled in
society
 That is why we must become more media literate and this begins with identifying the ways that
advertisers are trying to shape gender/sex in society.
 Therefore, I completed a content analysis on television advertisements with the following
parameters:
 Primetime television (7 – 11 pm, Sunday)
 One hour for each network station
 (1st hour = NBC, 2nd hour = Fox, 3rd hour = ABC, 4th hour = CBS)
 Record any instances of gender/sex representation
 Advertisements can display more than one gender/sex stereotypes
 Total of 167 advertisements viewed,
 *repeat advertisements were only recorded once*
 Categorized the advertisements according to the following tables of gender/sex stereotypes.
(Hatzithomas, Boutsouki, & Ziamou, 2016)

9. Male
Stereotype
Categories
(Hatzithomas, Boutsouki, &
Ziamou, 2016)

10. Female Stereotype
Categories
(Hatzithomas, Boutsouki, & Ziamou,
2016)

11. Stereotypes Occurrences
Theme of Sex
Appeal
72
Dominant over
Women
42
Authority Figure 37
Family Man 56
Frustrated Male 22
Activities and life
outside of home
57
Career-oriented 46
Non-traditional role 5
Neutral 28
N/A 37
Stereotypes Occurrences
Dependency 21
Housewife 41
Women concerned
with attractiveness 43
Women as sex
objects
91
Women in non-
traditional activities 54
Career-oriented 45
Voice of authority 36
Neutral 17
N/A 25
Male Stereotype Results
Female Stereotype Results
*Based on a total of 167 advertisements

12. Disciplining Gendered/Sexed Bodies
Concepts Reflected in Analysis:
 Attractiveness, or the heteronormative physical appearance that is seen as
pleasing, beautiful, and having sex appeal.
 Objectification, or when people are viewed as objects existing solely for the
pleasure of the viewer
 Body Movement, refers to how people ambulate, flow, travel, move in their bodies
in daily life, and how it feels to move.
*(included because of camera angles used to objectify and sexualize)
 How these concepts were represented in the viewed advertisements
 Male: 72/167 = 43%
 Female: 91/167 = 55%
 This shows how vital attractiveness is to contemporary advertisements and the
messages that they are communicating to viewers
(DeFrancisco & Palcewski, 2014)

13. Examples of Gendered/Sexed Bodies
Male Example
 Commercial featuring two soccer
players, Lionel Messi and Cristiano
Ronaldo.
 Male players are pictured as having
strength, prowess, and attractiveness
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y
NyEG52u6Ww#action=share
Female Example
 Kristen Stewart, actress, is promoting
a women’s perfume in this
commercial
 She is partially nude and displayed in
a sexual manner
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_
9Q7GcqKgH0

14. Body Surveillance
 Body surveillance, or internal objectification, refers to when people critically look
and judge themselves. (DeFrancisco & Palcewski, 2014)
 This was a frequent theme found during my content analysis
 Male: 22/167 = 13%
 Female: 43/167 = 26%
 As you can see, females displayed this behavior twice as much as men in the
commercials, and 12 of the male occurrences were accompanied by a woman displaying
the same behavior
 Female Example:
 Crest commercial displaying two women taking about how their teeth are becoming
yellow and they need to whiten them with Crest’s new Whitening Strips
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNtWKd8vr2k

15. Gendered/Sexed Language
 He/Man language, or the use of sex-exclusive language such as the generic he or
man used to refer to any person (female or male) or to all people (women and
men). (DeFrancisco & Palcewski, 2014)
 For example, Old Spice has an advertisement highlighting the “manliness” of its products.
This creates the perception that this product is only for men
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ11zij0HaM
 The falsely universal we, refers to the use of the collective we in discourse to
represent a particular few by making invisible a distinct other. (DeFrancisco & Palcewski,
2014)
 A commercial advertising a Dodge truck shows a group of Viking men driving around in
the truck singing “We Will Rock You” by Queen, implying a collective we. This is a false
representation because the commercial seems to only target men and ignores women
as potential consumers.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqg5oc20nxk

16. Making Sense of the Results
 Despite recent literature indicating that female portrayals in advertisements have
become more favorable, my results prove that gender/sex representation has not
changed as much as the public believes.
 Gender/Sex is continually sexualized and objectified through television
advertisements; attractiveness is an overwhelming theme in the majority of these
advertisements and that places pressure on viewers to look and behave a certain
way
 Knowing that these advertisements are able to construct our social reality, the
prevalence of them representing outdated gender norms is concerning and these
results prove this issues should be further addressed
 This study represents the first step towards resisting these gender-stereotyped
messages, which is recognition.

17. Proposed Solutions
 Further regulation on advertisements with gender/sex representation being a main
focus
 Teaching television viewing skills to children and adults, so they are not as affected by
the stereotypes presented in television commercials. Skills in evaluating commercials
include the following:
 Identifying explicit and implicit promises
 Differentiating among verbal, nonverbal, and visual content and their intended effects
 Recognizing persuasive techniques
 And comprehending commonly used vocabulary
 Recognition and awareness is the first step, and the next is careful consideration of
personal values
 Americans, certainly youths, need the guidance of parents, teachers, and community
leaders to help them make well-informed judgements and decisions about the televised
gender messages.
(Gentry & Harrison, 2010)

18. Limitations
 This study has an small sample size (4 hours of television viewing)
 The content wasn’t divided into genre, such as family-friendly or sporting events.
 I was the only researcher, so results could be perceived as carrying a male or
masculine biased
 Therefore, the next study that is conducted on this subject should take a much
larger sample size that covers all types of genres of television to represent the
difference in target audience commercials.
 There should also be more researchers for commercials that present uncertainty in
their categorization. In addition, these researchers should also possess diversity in
gender/sex, race, social status, etc.

19. References
Defrancisco, V. P., Palczewski, C. H., (2014). Gender in Communication: a critical introduction (2nd
ed.).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Gentry, J., & Harrison, R. (2010). Is advertising a barrier to male movement toward gender
change?. Marketing Theory, 10(1), 74-93. doi:10.1177/1470593109355246
Goffman, E. (1979). Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper and Row
Hatzithomas, L., Boutsouki, C., & Ziamou, P. (2016). A longitudinal analysis of the changing roles of
gender in advertising: a content analysis of Super Bowl commercials. International Journal Of
Advertising, 35(5), 888-906. doi:10.1080/02650487.2016.1162344
Pryor, D., & Knupfer, N. N. (1997). Gender Stereotypes and Selling Techniques in Television Advertising:
Effects on Society.
Stetler, B. (2011, May 3). Ownership of a TV sets falls in U.S. New York Times. Retrieved from
www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/business/media/03television.html?_r=0
Turow, J. (2017). Media Today: mass communication in a converging world (6th
ed.). New York:
Routledge.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2012, June 22). American time use survey—2011 results [Press release].
U.S. Department of Labor. Retrieved from www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm