I could probably just post this in the LC thread, but it seemed appropriate here.
Gender stereotypes have been banned from British ads. What does that mean?
I'm curious how this will play out.
Quote:
The new rule says that “advertisements must not include gender stereotypes that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offense,” and provides several examples. Ads can’t show men or women “failing to achieve a task specifically because of their gender” (“e.g. a man’s inability to change nappies; a woman’s inability to park a car”), depict “stereotypical personality traits” for boys and girls, or suggest that new mothers “should prioritize their looks or home cleanliness over their emotional health.”
Somewhat unrelated to gender stereotypes, this new rule also bans ads that “connect physical features with success in the romantic or social spheres.”
And notably, it does not ban showing women or men performing stereotypical tasks (e.g., women shopping or men doing at-home construction projects). Ads can still be targeted based on gender as well. The clarification of the rule also helpfully explains that ads can still portray “glamorous, attractive, successful, aspirational, or healthy people or lifestyles.”
Quote:
While the step seems well-intentioned, there are a lot of obvious questions, such as: Beyond this handful of fairly obvious examples, what counts as a gender stereotype? And how might they intersect with other stereotypes along racial or class lines? Is there really that great of a reason to disrupt representation in advertising, so that everyone can be equally manipulated into buying stuff they don’t need?
I spoke to Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University who published a paper on the famous Dove “Real Beauty” campaign in 2010, to get some answers.
Quote:
As a topline reaction to this measure, is it useful? Is it important? Why is it happening now?
It’s interesting. I used to teach an “advertising and society” class, and one of the key themes of the course is that advertising helps us as consumers and citizens understand the social world and our place within it. Advertising shapes our culture, but it also reflects our culture. And we’re at a cultural moment where there is increasing recognition that the traditional ways of representing gender don’t make sense anymore.
When my wife teaches Sociology 101, one of the assignments she typically has them do involves selecting some bit of advertising and doing a content analysis of it for themes related to gender stereotypes. It's always seemed like a pretty accessible way to introduce a whole bunch of topics, e.g. content analysis as a research method, but also gendered social norms/attitudes/beliefs and so on. So I think the point about advertising being both shaped by culture and also shaping culture is pretty salient.
I'm not sure how well regulation like this can function to change that dialectic though.
Quote:
Defining what a gender stereotype is seems extremely murky to me, especially since only a few examples are given and they’re all super specific to the domestic routine. Like, don’t show a dad not knowing how to change a diaper!
I absolutely agree. I think the definition of what they’re calling harmful and even the definition of stereotypes is in certain contexts very fuzzy. Gender portrayals in both the workplace and domestic life make it easier to parse out what a stereotype may look like, but there is still going to be a lot of leeway.
There’s this text, Gender Advertisements. It was written in 1979 by the sociologist Erving Goffman, and he did this analysis of hundreds of US ads for gender roles and offered up this typology for a number of ways in which gender-based power relations get communicated. And some of them are much more subtle. One is called “the feminine touch” — it’s basically like, if you picture how a woman in an ad holds a product compared to a man, the woman kind of daintily touches it, where a man seems to grip it. He talked about things like the relative size and position of people in ads — the female may be reclined while the male would be standing up.
It seems especially relevant now because it provides a useful way to think about the more subtle ways gender bias and gender stereotypes get communicated, but it’s in the nature of this nuance that makes policing and regulation much more difficult, much more onerous.