Gender Representation In Media

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The media is a powerful communication source from which people of all kinds retrieve their information. The media tell us who we should be and who we shouldn’t be, and it 's not just entertainment media that does this, but also advertisements within the media. The advertisements and media divide us into groups, one of the division lines drawn is gender. It is hard to measure to what extent media defines our identity, because the media begins influencing our thoughts since before childhood. Advertisements have had enough years in our society to define the role of gender in our lives, and tell us what we should buy according to these roles. Ads decide from the moment we’re born that it’s pearls for girls and force for boys. Because of this, …show more content…
These ads tell us that we must be a certain way in correspondence to our gender. They’ve kept on telling us the same message for years about gender. Other people interested in this include, Robert A. Bartsch, Teresa Burnett, Tommye R. Diller and Elizabeth Rankin-Williams, who, recreated a study conducted in 1988 which recreated a study in 1976. Their article “Gender Representation in Television Commercials: Updating an Update,” Analyzes trends in gender representation on televised commercials. Similar to previous studies Bartsch, Burnett, Diller and Rankin-Williams’s study results, “Indicated that men were underrepresented in commercials of domestic products, and women were underrepresented in commercials of nondomestic products,” (Bartsch, Burnett, Diller and Rankin-Williams 735). This is congruent with nonpermissive believes that the man always has to be the breadwinner and the women must clean the house and care for the children. Because of ads and media like this, men feel like then have to be strong and win everything with brute force despite situations changing through the eras. Even the researchers of this study discover that “The findings of this study mirror the findings of other recent studies, which indicate that gender bias continues to occur in television commercials as well as other forms of mass media…” (741). In ads women and men have not changed although gender inequality is decreasing in the workforce and opportunities for men and women to work in a job are virtually equal, and unemployment rates for men and women actively seeking a job are similar, yet the media is not catching up. The media advertisements continue to only target one gender and continue to add a solid wall to what it means to be man or

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