Gender Stereotypes

Zach Leventer
1/9/2012
Sociology Pd 5
Zuckerman
Advertisement Research Paper
Today technology is in a never stopping, advancing state. As technology is becoming more and more advance the accessibility to information is becoming easier. In this modern day with this ease to find information comes the ability for a company to reach a big chunk of the population. With this ability there come advertisements. Today companies spend big sums of money on advertisement. But what makes an advertisement effective. Is it, roles, the age demographic, stereotypes, or sex appeal?
After doing my research and looking through multiple dozens of magazine ads I have come to the hypothesis that the use of sex appeal is the most way to convince your customer of the idea that you are advertising
In America today gender identity is prominent. In guys they are expected to make the money, be good with tools, and have the control outside of the house. Girls are supposed to be the beautiful stay at home moms, who cook the food, and watch the kids. These gender identities are quite prominent in my research in how a

lot of the ads featuring women are young beautiful women because it will get peoples attentions.
In ads aiming towards women it showed women in nontraditional roles in which it shows the women how are seeing this add that they can due something great if they use their product. As well in male oriented ads it is more common to show common stereotypes such as trucks, hunting, and beer to make they man viewing this ad to think that is they use this product then they too can become more manly.
I believe that in modern society in the United States has changed into where men and women are more equal opportunity wise. This socialization is reflected in the ads by showing men and women doing the sames things against stereotypes such as women playing football or men staying home with their kids. This shows that the socialization but both boys and girls
This reflects the stress that is put on young girls to stay skinny, too skinny, to look like the celebrities. This is why i had my last choice of category being weight loss because i wanted to see the stress put on boys versus girls on being skinny. After looking at my results there is an 8:1 ratio of ads for women to men about weight loss. There is also view of the socialization process for boys in which I noticed that a good amount of ads featuring children with their parents showed young boys playing baseball with their father, showing the expectations for boys to play sports. Overall though I believe that the ads I viewed showed the diminishing differences between boys and girls. Showing men staying at home and cooking, and women being firefighters and playing football. After analyzing the results of my research I believe the research reflects a start to an end of gender roles. However its just a start. In my

research there was 14 adds of women using sex appeal versus 6 of men. This shows the use of sex to attract a certain demographic. Also in my research there were 31 ads reflecting beauty in women versus 22 in women. This shows that women are expected to be beautiful and how