gender in media

• The media have historically under-represented women, something Tuchman referred to as ‘symbolic annihilation’; women have also been misrepresented through stereotyping and subject to the ‘male gaze’.
• In recent years representations of women are more common and more positive.
• Gaye Tuchman developed the concept of Symbolic Annihilation to refer to the under-representation of women in a narrow range of social roles, while men were represented in a full range of social and occupational roles.
• Tuchman also argued that women’s achievements were often not reported or trivialised and often seen as less important than things like their looks.
• According to Tuchman, women were often represented in roles linked to gender stereotypes, particularly those related to housework and motherhood.
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• Ferguson (1980) conducted a content analysis of women’s magazines from the end of WWII to 1980 and found that representations were organised around what she called the cult of femininity, based on traditional, stereotypical female roles and values: caring for others, family, marriage, and concern for appearance.
• This material was produced primarily for A-level sociology students studying The Media option as their topic option, but it should also be of interest to media studies students.
• Sport England has been running its successful ‘ This Girl Can ‘ campaign since 2015, which has since evolved into the ‘fit got real’ campaign.
• In 2017, the Advertising Standards Authority launched new guidelines on avoiding gender stereotyping in advertising and banned two ads from airing in the UK because they reinforced gender stereotypes.
• Supporters of this initiative include advertising industry companies such as Unilever, P&G, WPP, Diageo, Google and Facebook.
• UN women has recently launched its ‘Unstereotype Alliance‘, which challenges gender stereotypes in advertising on a global scale.
• Orbach further argues that the media continues to associate slimness with health, happiness, success and popularity.
• There has been progress in recent years in the area of advertising, with Protein World’s ‘Beach Body Ready’ campaign prompting a significant backlash and an increase in the diversity of representations of women in advertising, for example: Dove’s Real Beauty campaign.
• In stories, women are mostly called upon to voice popular opinion or speak from their personal experience including as eye-witnesses or speak from their own subject position.
• The representation of women in Game of Thrones is complex, with some positive representations let down by the end of series eight.
• Tebbel (2000) argues that women are under more pressure than ever before to conform to the Beauty Myth.
• Killborn argues that media representations present women as ‘mannequins’ – size zero, tall and thin, and with perfect blemish-free skin.
• A film has to pass three tests to pass the Bechdel test: it has to have at least two (named) women in it who talk to each other above something other than a man.
• The representations of women in the news are overwhelmingly negative, with women largely confined to the private, emotional and subjective sphere, while men dominate the public, rational and objective sphere.
• Women are significantly under-represented in hard news stories and in all the authoritative, professional and elite source occupational categories, and are significantly over-represented as voices of the general, public (homemaker, parent, student, child) and in the occupational groups most associated with ‘women’s work’, such as health and social and childcare worker, office or service industry worker.
• Supporting evidence for Giroux lies in the historical representation of female characters in Disney Films – where the typical female character is a sexualised yet delicate princess who needs to be rescued by a stronger male character
• The overall effect of this is that women become objectified as sex objects, rather than being represented as whole people
• David Gauntlett in ‘Media Gender and Identity’ argues that there has been an increase in the diversity of representations and roles of women in the media since the 1970s, and a corresponding decrease in stereotypical representations, which broadly reflects wider social changes
• The representation of women in films There have been several films in recent decades with ‘strong’ lead female characters who are fierce, tough and resourceful, and thus arguably subvert hegemonic concepts of masculinity
• Misrepresentations (myths and stereotypes) In ‘ The Mouse that Roared ’ Henry Giroux argued that women were represented in a narrow, restricted and distorted range of roles
• However, rather than subverting hegemonic concepts of masculinity, it could be argued that such films still perpetuate the ‘beauty myth’ as all the above lead female characters are slim and attractive
• Laura Mulvey ‘The Male Gaze’ Laura Mulvey studied cinema films and developed the concept of the Male Gaze to describe how the camera lens eyed up the female characters for the sexual viewing pleasure of men
• Changes to the representations of women? The roles of women in society have changed considerably since these historical analyses of women’s representations: since the 1970s women now occupy a much wider range of roles and equality with men
• Examples of where Disney reinforces female stereotypes include: Snow White – who cleans the house of the male dwarves and is eventually rescued by a male prince because she is pretty
• The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation in 2006 found that there was little coverage of women’s sport, but what little coverage there was had a tendency to trivialise, sexualise and devalue women’s sporting achievements
• Beauty and the Beast – In which Belle endures an abusive and violent beast in order to redeem him
• Mulvey argued that the Male Gaze occurred in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera
• Since then a number of female heroines have featured as the lead characters in various action movies such Terminator 2, the Tomb Raider films, Kill Bill, and The Hunger Games