Stereotypes Of Women In Media

The fight for gender equality is neither a new nor diminishing topic. From as far back as history writes, women have always played the domestic role, while men took on the provider and overpowering role. Men have always been viewed as the dominating sex, and women the less capable and less successful. A woman’s role is supposedly to answer to any male figure, especially her husband. Her ambition is to fully care for her family; not to provide and income by working forty hours a week, because that is what the man is supposed to do. The notion for so many years was that women did not need to earn an education because they would not need it to take care of children and keeping the house. This view of women even carries over into television
And like everything else, television and other media sources have a great influence on the stereotype of women. As mentioned before, women are advertised as domesticated women who aren’t always employed. Lori Wolin wrote, “generally speaking, a frame acts much the same way in media analysis that a schema does in cognitive psychology by selecting out certain aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient than others. “Advertisements can play a crucial role in the process of stereotyping gender by depicting how we think men and women behave rather than how we actually behave as men and women” Scott Coltrane quoted. Whether it is deliberate or not, we are all influenced by the images we see and the words we hear. If we continuously hear something or watch it eventually becomes an influence on our overall opinion. “Televised male characters are generally shown as knowledgeable, independent, powerful, successful, and prone to swift decisive action. Televised female characters are most often depicted as passive, emotional, dependent on men, and eager to serve others.” (Scott Coltrane) On television and in other media such as magazines, women seem to only be given certain roles; roles that a man would be embarrassed or emasculated by. For example, only women appear in magazines such as Cosmo, Seventeen, and Playboy. This notion of women only participating in and representing certain products in
When writing this analysis, and throughout this entire class I was under the impression that stereotyping women and men into certain responsibilities was something that needed to be altered. After going through the first chapter of this course, one of the quotes I had passed stated, “Women and men don’t have equal opportunity because inequality is built into our capitalist economic systems. Inequality is linked to class structure.” This quote caught my attention because in the articles I have reflected on, illustrating how men and women are treated differently and essentially discriminated against by men is a harsh reality. If both sexes were deemed equal, would be worse. The very same reasoning is behind our three branches of government. If all the power was granted to both sexes, catastrophe is guaranteed to