Introduction
Women have long fought for their rights and freedoms in the society. Since the day when they have obtained suffrage, another fight, the one for their role in the society has started. In all the times, the society has used media to reflect its attitude towards such issues as these. Among all the media, television influences the gender role values in the society most of all this is why it is most often used for stereotyped and discriminative representations of women. TV commercials often serve as a strong indicator of gender roles in the society this is why a number of gender studies use namely TV commercials to explore gender issues. One of the gender studies carried out by Dominick and Rauch in 1972 revealed that around 70% of television commercials presented stereotyped image of women and their limited life options. The intent of this paper is to analyze current television commercials and compare the results with those reported by Dominick and Rauch to find out whether any changes in the portrayal of women in television have taken place since the 1970s. Considering how fast society is evolving, I predict that the role of the women in television commercial has progressed, and that therefore there will be more voiceovers of women and fewer ads showing women in subservient positions.
Method
The material for the analysis will be provided by a popular network (www.visit4info.com) that gives access to a number of current television commercials. 20 of such commercials will be randomly selected and analyzed. The data will then be presented in Commercial Coding Sheets and summarized in the Summary Data Sheet.
Procedure
Two experimenters of opposite genders are going to be involved into the research. Each of them will watch, code, and analyze the TV commercials separately; at the end of the procedure, their results will be compared in order to ensure the inter-observer reliability of the chosen research method. The researchers will start with agreeing on the TV commercials that will be analyzed. In the course of watching the commercials, each of them will be coded according to 8 categories: product (body, home, food, auto, sports, other), central figure (male or female), credibility (user, authority, other), mode (visual, voice over), role (spouse, parent, home-maker, worker, professional, celebrity, narrator, boy/girl friend, sex object, other), location (home, store, occupational, other), arguments (scientific, non-scientific, none), and reward (social enhancement, self enhancement, practical, other, none). The results of each of the experimenters will then be compared and corresponding conclusions will be made.
Data Analysis
After coding the commercials, the results have been transferred to the Summary Data Sheet. This allowed calculating the percentage of observations within each category, as well as easily comparing the results obtained by two experimenters. Thus, ranking of the commercials in terms of the products presented, it has been discovered that food and body products have been the most numerous (each of them constituted 45% from the total number of commercials), followed by home products (10%). At this, auto, sports, and other types of products have not been found in the commercials analyzed. At this, it is remarkable that 70% of all the advertisements had females as central figures with, correspondingly, 30% presenting males. In terms of credibility, 70% of the commercials presented central figures as users, 25% as authority, and 5% as other (in Tesco commercial young girls were represented as models, so they are neither users nor authorities). In terms of mode, the results were almost equal, 55% for visual mode and 45% for the voice over mode.
The most interesting situation was with ‘role’ category. This is the only category where the experimenters disagreed when ranking the observations; the difference within this category was 40%, which means that the experimenters did not agree in 4 of 10 sub-categories within this category; this makes it less than 2% in all the observations (two experimenters have given 320 replies in total (20 advertisements and 8 categories) and there are only 4 different replies, which makes it 4×100/320 = 1, 25%). According to the observations of the first experimenter, 35% of all the commercials presented their central figure (70% of these were women) as a sex object; in 10% this was a spouse, in another 10% a worker, 10% as boy/girl friend, and in other 10% as other (in case with Burger King and E45). The remaining 25% of instances are equally distributed among such categories as parent, home-worker, professional, celebrity, and narrator (5% per each category). With the second experimenter, the results differed only slightly; the experimenter identified 10% of commercials as depicting central figure in the role of a parent, 10% in a role of a professional, 5% as other, and 0% in the role of a narrator.
In terms of location, 70% of all the commercials presented other location that home (20%), occupational (10%), and store (0%). Most of such locations included streets, beaches, studios, trade centers, and a mixture of locations. The observations within the ‘argument’ category have shown that 65% presented a scientific argument and 35% none (they simply displayed the products); none of the commercials presented non-scientific arguments. Finally, with respect to reward, 45% promoted social enhancement, 40% other reward, 10% practical, and only 5% self enhancement.
These data reveal that still 70% of the TV commercials portray women. The fact that 35% of all the advertisements present their central figure as a sex object shows the attitude of the society towards women. This, however, is not the issue to research here. What is important for namely this research is that only 10% of the commercials presented their female central figures as spouses, 5-10% (different results obtained by two experiments) as parents, and only 5% as home-makers.
Discussion and Questions
The results that have been obtained in the course of the experiment are almost opposite to those obtained by Dominick and Rauch in 1972. This research has revealed that, on the average, 10% (as compared to 70% obtained by these researchers) of the television commercials that have females as central figures present them in a role of a spouse, parent, or home-maker. This presupposes that, for the past four decades, a shift in the role of a woman in the society has taken place. Taking into consideration the fact that 35% of all the commercials presented their central figures as sex objects (at this, 90% of all the commercials had namely women as central figures), it can be seen in which direction exactly this role has shifted.
My partner and I have obtained slightly different results, but only in the category considering the role of a central figure. This might be related to our difference in gender and, consequently, in our views on which role a female plays in the advertisement. Since the percentage of agreement was almost 98%, the difference hardly influenced the overall results of the experiment; this shows that the best means of addressing the issue of inter-observer reliability has been used.
There was one problem faced in the course of the experiment. The matter is that once or twice a situation with repeated commercials was encountered. The repeated commercials were skipped because coding them would significantly distort the real picture of how women are represented in commercials. Not coding them, in its turn, did not affect the results of the experiment in any way.
Lastly, it is hard to state whether observing the commercials on a different type of program would give different results. I think that, in order to conduct a proper study, a larger sample of advertisement should be analyzed. I would select at least three network channels dividing the advertisements in 3 groups: daytime, weekend, and primetime. I would present the advertisements to the coders without informing of the time of broadcast and network channel. In this study, I would expect that women during primetime would be more likely to be shown in positions of authority and in settings away from the home than they were during daytime. Men, in contrast, would be more likely to be portrayed as a parent or spouse and in home settings during primetime than they were at weekends.
Conclusion
This experiment consisted in coding and analyzing 20 randomly selected television commercials in order to identify whether the modern commercials have undergone any changes with regards to the portrayal of women. The hypothesis was supported by the fact that fewer ads showed women in roles defined solely in terms of their relationship with men: around 10% accordingly to this study versus the 70% reported in 1972 by Dominick and Rauch. In regards of the other prediction in the hypothesis, that there will be more voiceovers of women today versus the data reported in 1972, it has been found that women constituted 45% (in contrast to the 1970s’ 6%) of the authority figures of voice over announcers, and 10% versus Dominick and Rauch’s 70% depicted women in the subservient positions. This means that the role of a woman in the society has changed much since 1972 and the modern society views women as confident and independent individuals.