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Gender Displaying Television Commercials: A Comparative Study of Television Commercials in the 1950s and 1980s1 Kenneth Allan2
University of North Carohna at Greensboro Scott Coltrane
University of California, Riverside Recent researchers have argued both that there has been change in the way gender is portrayed in television commercials and that gender images have remained stereotypical Comparing television commercials from the 1950s/early 1960s to commercials from the 1980s, this study explores the issue of how much, if any, change has occurred in gender images. Additionally, the study focuses on the gender display of main characters and the circumstances under which it varies. Results indicate that there has been change in the images of women but not men. The activity that women are pictured in significantly changed from the 1950s to the 1980s, and a change in activity has the strongest effect on the display of gender.
What the human nature of males and females really consists of . . . is a capacity to learn to provide and to read depictions of masculinity and femininity and a willingness to adhere to a schedule for presenting these pictures .... One might just as well say there is no gender identity. There is only a schedule for the portrayal of gender. (Erving Goffman, 1979, p. 8)
Adults and children are exposed to gender depictions from a multitude of sources, but perhaps the most ubiquitous and stereotyped portrayals come from television. Since its introduction in the 1940s, television has become so pervasive in the United States that it is preeminent among current purveyors of popular cultural imagery. Over 90 million homes, or 98% of all U.S. households, now have a television set, and over three quarters of those have multiple sets (Comstock, 1991; Kellner, 1990; Signorielli, 1991). The average U.S. household has at least one television "on" for almost seven hours every day (Signorielli & Lears, 1992) and the typical adult viewer watches over 30 hours of television each week (Bretl & Cantor, 1988). Since over 20% of the typical broadcast hour consists of commercials, an average American could watch over 30,000 commercials in a year, or over 2,000,000 in a lifetime (Bretl & Cantor, 1988; Comstock, 1991).
While dramatic in its own right, this familiar litany of figures...