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Female stereotypes in 21st century news and business magazines

Posted on:2010-06-05Degree:M.SType:Thesis
University:San Jose State UniversityCandidate:Gizycki, GosiaFull Text:PDF
GTID:2445390002988394Subject:Psychology
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This thesis examines the visual representations of women in nationally circulated news and business magazines, based on nine forms of stereotypical nonverbal gender displays identified by Goffman (1979), Kang (1997), Umiker-Sbeok (1996), and Lindner (2004). This study is based on Lindner's (2004) study and duplicates its coding categories. Content analysis was used to examine stereotypical depictions of women in 21st century advertisements. The researcher and a research assistant coded a total of 12,458 advertisements from 2000 through 2007 from Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, and Forbes, of which 89% or 11,134 contained at least one stereotypical depiction within the nine categories. Advertisements containing one or more females, either in the absence of men or the presence of one or more men, were coded in this study.;Women were shown as objects, whose function in the advertisement was to be looked at at the highest frequency. Women were shown inhibited by their movement at the lowest frequency. Among the four magazines, Time had the highest number of ads available to be coded as well as the highest number of stereotypes. The results from Lindner's (2004) study and those of the current study concurred in that there were still low percentages of movement and function ranking. The biggest difference between both studies was in the area of relative size, where the current study had a higher percentage of ads that showed the man taller, larger, or taking up more space than the woman.
Keywords/Search Tags:Women
PDF Full Text Request
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