Exploring how women business professionals want to be portrayed in advertisements
Date
2023-09-12
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
Previous research has offered two critical contributing factors to the gap in female leadership representation— gender bias and female leadership stereotypes. The continual use of stereotypes within media continues to spread and reinforce these assumptions of women’s credibility as professionals and leaders. Amid varying results on the most effective way to portray female business professionals and leaders within marketing communications, I used interpretative phenomenology analysis (IPA) approach to explore female business professionals’ perspectives on how they want to see themselves represented in advertisements and marketing communications. I conducted interviews with twelve women business professionals in their early to mid-career. The major findings of this study express that there is not one ideal portrayals of women business professionals. Instead, women are seeking individualistic and unique portrayals of women business professionals by comprising ad portrayals that contain both masculine and feminine representations of three distinct ad elements. Supporting these major findings are general ad observations and a discussion of the ads used in the study that demonstrate the blending of gender portrayals to create individualized representations of women business professionals and leaders.
Description
Keywords
Advertising, Women, Representation, Stereotypes
Citation
Degree
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Department
Edwards School of Business
Program
Marketing