Social Media Stereotypical Representations: Gender Roles in Advertisements

Abstract

Mass media play various crucial roles in society. They inform and report on the latest current events, provide frameworks for analysis, sensitise the audience, mobilise them as citizens concerning miscellaneous issues, reproduce mainstream popular culture, update society and entertain as well. Furthermore, the media can be a main agent promoting gender differences and equality simultaneously. Advertising is regarded as a pivotal dynamo in the media realm, since it deploys many strategies and techniques to persuade people to believe in the product and consume it. However, as previously mentioned, it sheds light on the representations of men and women in different contexts, emphasizing the gender based omnipresent biases and stereotypes in multiple life areas. Such portrayals definitely reflect the embedded beliefs or convictions of the society’s members majority they still perpetuate. Either on TV, radio, newspapers, social media, movies, video games, apps or platforms, ads do effectively influence the way people think, perceive and interact with their surroundings. This can have detrimental outcomes in terms of restricting the roles of men and women and limiting the potential opportunities for both of them. Ads usually associate females with household chores, kids’ upbringing or childcare responsibilities, their attractive physical appearance with their glamour or enticing bodies as a mere object, as well as their ethnicity, race, age or sexuality, which are also targeted. Whereas males are epitomized as strong individuals with muscles, breadwinners and decision-makers. Hence, this paper will attempt to tackle social media ads’ serious effects on diverse society segments’ psychologies, behaviours and thoughts, including youth and adults, particularly women who are mostly exposed to a great deal of all sorts of violence, and also investigate the advertisements’ intrinsic motives behind relying heavily on stereotypes to achieve their aims.