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

2. 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.

3. 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”

4. Michelle

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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

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

10. Jenn

11. 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

12. Artificial Advertisements
Michelle

13. Sexualized Advertisements
Michelle

14. Heroin Chic Advertisements
Michelle

15. Neutral Advertisements
Jenn

16. Athletic Advertisements
Jenn

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. What we expected to find…
GAM
Jenn

20. 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

21. 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”

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

23. 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

24. 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?

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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:

28. 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.

29. Questions?