If you picked up a magazine or watched tv 50 years ago, you would see woman in ads portraying very traditional
roles of mother, wife, airline hostess, or sex symbol. Over the last 50 years, that has been slowly changing. To get an idea of how women are portrayed today, I picked up 6 magazines that were in my house; The Atlantic, Business Week, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Popular Science, and Disney Family Fun.
Interestingly, the magazine with the most gender defined roles placing woman as mother and caregiver was seen in Disney Family Fun. Women in this magazine were exclusively caregivers. There was only one advertisement featuring a man, and he was discussing the
families financial security- in the role of the bread winner. The magazine that portrayed women in the best way was The Atlantic. In this magazine, women were in gender neutral adds or in adds that portrayed them in positions of power. The one exception was for Cathy Pacific- where an Asian woman with a very subservient smile was serving coffee and food to a white male in first class. Many magazines have turned to selling a product without any reference to gender or the use of people at all. The worst magazine for portraying woman as a sex symbol was Popular Science. In that magazine, people were used in only 9 adds, most were of products only. Of the 9 adds with people, 6 were men only showing men in traditional roles of power. The 3 with women showed women as sex symbols, in a degrading way or in a traditional role. What I take from this is that while the media industry is changing, we still need to be aware of images that portrait women and men in traditional roles. We need to educate our children that the images they are exposed to may give them a wrong impression of the role of women and men in society.
The photos, out of order to my writing are: In A Clear World (SAP) Airline Hostess (Cathy Pacific) and Business Woman (B of A) were all from The Atlantic. The add of the Father and daughter(First Fidelity), and Grandma and daughter (Haaden Dass) are from Disney Family Fun and Hot and Glossy Baby (Muscle Gloss) is from Popular Science.
