Jennifer George Michelle Uhlenbrock The Effects of Magazine Advertising on The Perceived Abilities of Women in Leadership Positions Jennifer George Michelle Uhlenbrock M

Media Advertisement Media advertising relies on and reinforces stereotypes of women Evident in TV advertising, magazines Gendered Advertisements (Goffman, 1976) How women and men are portrayed in print advertisements Six visual cues for power that tend to be in favor of male dominance M ** Bill: Is Goffman’s book Gendered Advertisements? I like your first two points after Goffman, but the last point I’m not sure I see how it follows.

Media Advertisement (cont.) High fashion magazines often portray women in negative light Submissive Powerless Objectified/sexualized Childlike Not all magazine advertisements portray women in negative light Powerful women are present in ads, but scarce Michelle Slide 3: High fashion magazines It seems that the more fashion oriented the magazine is, the more “negative” the ads are Magazines such as Women’s Health or Good Housekeeping seem to have some positive ads… although they are scarce **Bill: Might change first point to “often portray”

Michelle

Past Studies of Magazine Advertisements Rudman and Borgida (1995) Sexist vs. non-sexist ads Women in sexist ads rated as less intelligent, less powerful, and less autonomous Findings: Exposure to sexist ads increased the occurrence of thoughts about women as objects Michelle

What About Women? TV Commercials as Achievement Scripts for Women (Geis, Brown, Jennings & Porter, 1984) Women who viewed sex-stereotyped commercials were more likely to deemphasize achievement and emphasize homemaking Michelle In another study done by Geis, Brown, Jennings and Porter (1984), female participants were asked to view either traditional sex-stereotyped commercials (i.e. the woman depicted as the “homemaker” and the man as the “bread winner”) or role reversed commercials (i.e. the man is the “homemaker” and the woman is the “bread winner”). This study found that the women who viewed sex-stereotyped commercials were more likely to deemphasize achievement and emphasize homemaking in their essays than women who viewed the exact same commercial with the male and female roles switched.

Stereotyping How Gender Stereotypes Prevent Women’s Ascent Up the Organizational Ladder (Heilman, 2001) There is a scarcity of women in upper level positions Gender stereotypes and the expectations they produce can have negative effects on women in the workplace Jenn **Bill: Think about how to more directly connect these points to the main theme of your study. Subpoint 2 in particular could be reworded or paraphrased to better capture the main point you want to make. result in devaluation of their performance, denial of credit for their success, or penalization for being competent Gender stereotypes and expectations could be cause of scarcity of women in upper level positions

Research Question We are interested in studying how magazine advertisements (specifically women’s fashion and beauty magazines) affect perceptions of women in leadership positions Jenn

Methods Materials Magazine advertisements from high fashion and beauty magazines Cosmo, Vogue, InStyle, Glamour, and Women’s Health Jenn

Jenn

Materials (cont.) Types of Ads “Negative” categories Artificial: doll-like, mannequin, unreal, puppet Sexualized Heroin chic “Neutral” category Athletic category Blurred product information to prevent associations with products Michelle Negative and Neutral – suggestions of different terminology

Artificial Advertisements Michelle

Sexualized Advertisements Michelle

Heroin Chic Advertisements Michelle

Neutral Advertisements Jenn

Athletic Advertisements Jenn

Gender Authority Measure Questionnaire Rudman and Kilianski (2000) Series of statements that evaluate people’s preferences for men and women in leadership positions Rated on a 1-5 Likert scale Our study: 1-6 scale Example: “If I were in serious legal trouble, I would prefer a male to a female lawyer.” Jenn In addition we added 3 of our own questions, due to splitting the GAM in half. We wanted to ensure that the questions asked pre and post were sufficient. Note: we changed the scale from 1-5 to 1-6, so that our participants could not pick the neutral condition.

Hypothesis We expect to find that both men and women who view the negative categories of ads, will score higher on the GAM, than those participants who viewed neutral or athletic ads. Scoring higher = greater preference for men than for women in high-status jobs Jenn **Bill: Specify that “scoring higher” means showing greater preference for men than for women in high-status jobs.

What we expected to find… GAM Jenn

Participants & Procedure 48 males 220 females 4 chose not to respond Ages 18 – 62 Average : 25 Online study Informed consent and random assignment to 5 different levels of the IV Jenn

Procedure (cont.) First set of GAM questions answered GAM split into pre and post measure to increase statistical power 9 questions each 10 advertisements from a single category Brief response given to each ad ‘Use three words to describe this ad.’ Second set of GAM questions Demographic questions Debriefing form Michelle Questions are irrelevant to the study and will be disregarded in final analysis of data Questions serve to ensure that participants are taking sufficient time to view the ads **Bill: change “10 randomly selected advertisements” to “10 advertisements from a single category (e.g., athletic)” **Change “Question unrelated...” to “Brief response given to each ad”

What We Expected to Find… GAM Jenn This is what we expected to find… remind audience of our hypothesis

Time vs. Condition F(4,259) = 1.786, p = 0.132 GAM α = 0.853 α = 0.7 Jenn **Bill: Nice way to present the Cronbach alphas! α = 0.853 α = 0.7

Discussion We concluded that short term effects of advertisements on people’s perceptions of women in leadership positions were mild and perhaps non-existent We are still concerned about the long term effects and effects on other attitudes Michelle **Bill: Very nicely phrased! Take time with point #2, elaborating a bit on what long term effects might look like and how they might be caused, and on what other attitudes might be more influenced than the attitudes toward women in leadership DV that you guys used. Maybe the effect on objectifying women?

Limitations Procedure Conditions Limited number of ads. Shown for a short period of time Conditions Some ads could have easily fit into more than one category Could have used more “pure” ads Michelle Limitations with procedure We included a limited number of advertisements in our study. Each condition only had 10 photographs. We limited the number of photographs to 10, in order to ensure that our participants would not get bored with the study. Unfortunately we were unable to ensure that our participants were viewing the ads for a sufficient amount of time and noticed when we were analyzing our data that few participants spent more than 7 minutes viewing the photographs, and many did not answer the questions that accompanied them (although this data was irrelevant to our study). Additionally, we measured our participants views twice by splitting the GAM into a pre and post test. We did this because we wanted to control for variance and wanted to increase our study’s statistical power. **Bill: 7 minutes is actually a pretty long time. Don’t forget that if 7 minutes elapsed between submitting answers to the first set of questions and submitting answers to the second set, that 7 minutes also includes the time it took them to fill out the second set of questions, which was probably at least a minute.

Connections to Past Research Geis, Brown, Jennings and Porter (1984) Had significant results – why? Participants wrote essays about how they imagine their lives and concerns 10 years from now, allowed for flexibility Used TV ads which vividly depict life as opposed to still photography Michelle More attitudes and expressive thoughts in writing an essay than answering questions from the GAM. If you don’t agree with the items on the Likert scale, you can’t really do anything about it. **Nice.

Future Directions Repeat research as a longitudinal study Use different methods of measuring attitudes Measuring different attitudes Stricter rules for ad selection and categorization Different types of media Television, commercials, music, etc. Jenn Measuring attitudes: essays, short answer Attitudes:

Conclusion Reasons to be concerned These magazines reach over 9,000,000 women a year Ways women are being portrayed is negative Jenn **Great. Still reasons to be concerned about these advertisements…reach over 9 million women each year. Many are young girls, giving them impressions of how they are to look, act, etc. Women are being portrayed negatively so should still be concerned.

Questions?