Stereotypes Of Gender In Advertising

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Gender is also assumed to play a major role in the distinct ways females and males store and process information about the self, social groups, and experiences. Gender schema theory argues that people learn, through socialization to the culture and in social discourse, to activate stored information which leads to differential processing of the same messages (Bem, 1981; Cantor & Mischel, 1979). Because schemas help direct the encoding and retrieval of information (Cantor & Mischel, 1979; Lingle & Ostrom, 1979), we would expect gender schema-based evaluations by television viewers. Gender schemas have been found to affect recall of ads (Gentry & Haley, 1984). Adolescents may use gender schemas to perceive, attend to, store in memory, recognize,…show more content…
The main argument appears to be that the continued stereotyping of women in ads would only reinforce the ideas of a patriarchal society where the role of a female is predominantly that of child bearer and homemaker. The ideology of patriarchy portrays males as being the ruling class and dominant figures in society, while the myth of women being subservient wives and mothers is naturalized and glorified, therefore, the subordinate class accepts it as normal (Shields, 1990; Stern, 1992; Weedon, 1997). Few studies have been conducted on gender stereotyping in advertisements in the Asian region and even fewer on the effects of advertisements on audiences. This may be due to the perception that Asian countries are still looked upon as conservative where traditional sex roles continue to apply (Anderson, 2001; Behera, 1989; Byung-Sup, 1991; Lanot, 1995; Mazumdar, 1996). Whereas other countries have been examining this topic since the seventies (COURTNEY; LOCKERETZ, 1971; VENKATESAN; LOSCO, 1975; BELKAOUI; BELKAOUI, 1976; GOFFMAN, 1979), very little academic articles have addressed this subject matter in the Philippines. This void should be fulfilled because advertising portrayals have important social influences. Indeed, studies have revealed that stereotyped portrayals of women produce negative feelings in female…show more content…
Scholars who have reviewed this body of work have concluded that gender development is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon and that the dimensions of gender development are not tightly related (e.g., Huston, 1983; Ruble et al., 2006; Tenenbaum & Leaper, 2002). In this research, we focused on the developmental course of one important aspect of gender development - attitudes about gender - across middle childhood and adolescence. Gender researchers make the distinction between flexible thinking about gender with regard to one’s self versus tolerance of flexibility in others (Katz & Ksansnak, 1994), and, reflecting the multifaceted nature of gender, these two domains of attitude flexibility behave somewhat differently. Our study pays attention on how traditional or flexible youth are in their attitudes about others’

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