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South Africa: Women More Often Seen And Not Heard in Adverts, Study Finds
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
18 July 2007
Posted to the web 18 July 2007
Sanchia Temkin
Johannesburg
A GROUND-breaking study on gender and advertising in Southern Africa by lobby group Gender Links has found that while women are more likely to feature in advertising than in news content they are more likely to be seen than heard.
The report on the study released yesterday said women predominated in billboards and still images but hardly featured in voice-overs. In stills, blatant stereotypes were at their worst.
Covering 1650 radio, television, print and billboard advertisements in SA, Mauritius, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the study aimed to establish how women and men are represented and portrayed in advertising.
Monitoring took place over two weeks in December followed by male and female focus group discussions on selected case studies that were used in the report to amplify the quantitative findings.
Gender Links executive director Colleen Lowe Morna said: "Unlike news content that must be impartial, considered and fair, advertisers have the licence to play with our minds by accentuating the bizarre; taking us on feel-good trips or lifting us out of our normal space: whatever it takes to capture our attention.
"Precisely because of its power over the mind, advertising is a critical area of concern for transforming gender relations," she said.
A basic test of gender blindness was the extent to which women and men were represented in content compared with their representation in society.
Women constituted only 38% of subjects (images and voices) in advertisements in SA, compared with the overall average of 41% in the study. This is the second lowest proportion in the report. Zambia had 47% women in advertisements monitored, Zimbabwe 43% and Mauritius 36%.
Examples of "gender blindness" identified concerned how sports advertising ignored female audiences, for example, a billboard advertised a prominent sports outfitter featuring successful sports people, among them Tiger Woods. Women participants felt the advert disregarded female sports participation.
While SA hosted the Women Golf World Cup in January, they felt excluded from sports by such advertisements. Male participants also felt the advertisement makes golf appear like a man's sport.
With few exceptions, the study found SA' s advertising did little to challenge stereotypes of women's and men's roles. Women predominated as domestic workers, models, parents or spouses, and men as sports persons (100%), professionals, politicians, entertainers and business persons.
As in other countries, women in advertisements in SA predominated in still images (print and billboards) rather than in voice and sound (on television and radio). Men's voices dominated in voice-overs, a finding in line with global research. At 24%, SA and Zimbabwe had the lowest proportion of women voice-overs in the whole study.
The study found stereotypes at their worst in billboards, often showing women as sex objects for men's gratification.
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Telecoms tended to be the most advertised services or products followed by indoor household products. Real estate, pharmaceuticals software and computer services were the least advertised products in the monitoring period.
There were roughly equal numbers of women and men under 36, but women dwindled virtually into nonexistence over 60.
But not all is gloom. Focus group participants identified refreshing examples of gender-aware advertising, including financial services, shops and educational opportunities targeting women, men and children.
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