Portrayals of Women in Commercial Advertising: A Comparative Study Based on Contemporary Advertisements

Abstract

Both Social Progress Index (SPI) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have given importance to gender equality and inclusiveness in their agendas as it is considered one of the primordial struggles essential to bring balance to the social sphere. On the other hand, advertising has been one of the primary modes of transforming and transporting these messages to the audiences seeded across the furthest corners of the remotest locations. While in the beginning, advertisements were used to serve simple requirements of sharing information among multiple receivers, over the hundreds of years of socioeconomic, cultural, political, and economic changes, made it complicated. Among many roles that an advertisement plays as a non-personal mode of communication, bringing social changes is one of them that has the power even to form values and opinions and sometimes brings phenomenal changes into behavior. The commercial form of advertainments is often found in favor of such portals that discreetly britches a few fundamental values and ethics set by the governing bodies and may lead to spreading misinformation and misconceptions. Similarly, women have been subjectified in advertisements from the very beginning with different objectives, however, for this research, the portrayals of women in commercial advertisements have broadly segregated into conventional and non-conventional categories. To analyze the distinctive differences between the two categories, the advertisements from 2015 to 2022 have been considered as the SDGs enacted by the United Nations with a prominent goal ’gender equality’ aims to bring down the conventional categorization and portrayals of gender in all forms.