Do Malaysian advertisements portray women and men in a balanced and non-stereotyped way? Who is to blame if they do not? Media organisations, women themselves or advertisers who determine the outcome of an advertisement?
From a one-year study on print and electronic media, a women's organisation has found out that advertisers are mostly to blame for cases of sexist portrayal of women. In most advertisements, men are often portrayed as smart, intelligent, technologically advanced and knowledgeable as opposed to women, who are often depicted as mothers who are extremely happy doing housework or females who are obsessed with nothing but their physical appearance.
Nor have advertisers challenged the myths of gender-stereotyped roles between husbands and wives, or explored the possibility that a household could have two mothers or two fathers.
Motivated largely by profits and the notion that 'sex, scandal and bad news sell', media organisations pander to the whims and fancies of advertisers; never mind that the messages transmitted across the nation are sexist and politically incorrect.
In fact, in all the observations, only one advertisement challenged the traditional role of a male. It depicted a man taking on the role of parenting, loving and caring for his baby.
The results of the media monitoring survey entitled 'Preliminary Findings: Gender-Sensitive and Gender-Biased Advertisements' conducted by the All Women's Action Society (Awam), were released yesterday by Universiti Sains Malaysia lecturer and co-founder of the Penang Women's Crisis Centre, Dr Rohana Ariffin in conjunction with International Women's Day.
Stereotypes
Based on 208 types of television, newspaper and magazine advertisements and 2,631 observations, the research focused on how women and gender relations are portrayed in various product advertisements to do with personal accessories, beauty care, and business and automobile sectors.
The three forms of media under observation were television (RTM2, TV3 and NTV7), newspapers ( New Straits Times, The Star and Utusan Malaysia ) and magazines ( Her World, Wanita and FHM ).
Rohana concluded that beauty products advertisement often portray gender stereotypes. Eighty types of beauty products did this at a frequency of 130 times throughout the observation.
In these advertisements, women are mostly shown as housewives or homemakers and men portrayed as professionals closely linked with advanced technology such as cellular phones, computers and cars, said Rohana.
"Only nine advertisements showed women as having professional careers and this could be regarded as a neutral role," she said, citing examples of advertisements from Adam, Pioneer, Marie France, Rolex and Raymond Weil.
"In all these observations, there is only one positive advertisement portrayed whereby a man takes on the role of parenting," she added.
The research also implied that lighter-skin and slimmer women had better chances at advertisement roles than darker and bigger women. However, these standards do not apply to the male population seeking advertisement jobs; in fact, the opposite is more true here, as darker-skin men are preferred.
On television, out of 150 females observed, facial appearances for 72 percent of them were fair, 26 percent, medium, and 2 percent, of dark complexions. Out of the 125 males, there were 36 percent fair males, 57.6 percent medium-dark and 6.4 percent dark ones.
From the total of 150 females observed, 94.7 percent were seen as slim, 4.67 percent were overweight, while the body size of one of the female model was not visible. Of the 125 males, 95.2 percent were slim and average sized, only 4.8 percent were overweight.
On the characteristics of models, women were mostly shown as feminine (38.7 percent) and cheerful (25.3 percent) as well as loving and caring (14 percent), said Rohana.
"Only eight women (5.3 percent) are shown as smart and intelligent, two (1.3 percent) in experienced and wise roles, and three (2 percent) who are serious, seven (4.6 percent) playful, three (2 percent) stupid and one (0.6 percent) confused," she said.
"This is in contrary to 29 (23.2 percent) men depicted as intelligent and smart, 26 (20.8 percent) cheerful, 14 (11.2 percent) manly characters, 11 (8.8 percent) serious, 10 (8 percent) loving and caring and 19 (15.2 percent) playful," she added.
Unrealistic picture
Speaking to about 30 women from various media and non-governmental organisations, Awam's president Dr Mary Suma Cardosa said that women's struggles against violence and inequality will fail as long as there is an unjustified negative portrayal of women in the media.
"Advertisements often portray women primarily as consumers and target girls and women of all ages inappropriately, reinforcing traditional roles of women," she said in her message to commemorate International Women's Day (IWD) in Kuala Lumpuryesterday.
"This unbalanced and unrealistic picture propagated by media does not do justice to women's diverse lives and contributions to society and propagates the myth of the subordinate role of women in society," she added.
Awam urges those in the advertising industry and media to work together with women's groups to make a change toward a more positive and gender-balanced portrayal of women and men in the media.
"One of the steps that can be taken is perhaps to look into incorporating a self-regulatory mechanism for the media to portray women in a gender-balanced situation," Cardosa said.
"Another is to encourage women to move into decision-making positions that influence media policy and practise in order to eliminate gender-based stereotyping," she added.
Information Ministry officials and advertising company representatives invited for the seminar did not turn up.
SUSAN LOONE is a malaysiakini journalist.