Very little has changed for women in advertising in the last 10 years, according to new research data. And yet this comes as no surprise to me. Simply because, very little has changed for women in most industries- PR, STEM, and now Advertising. You’d say, we’ve made progress, and I say there is still so much yet to be done. 

This is 2017, yet:

• there are twice as many male characters in ads than female characters.
• 25% of ads feature men only, while only 5% of ads feature women only.
• 18% of ads feature only male voices, while less than 3% of ads featuring female voices only.
• men get about four times as much screen time as women and speak about seven times more than women

In some sense, I feel the entire communications industry is still grappling with how to address gender gap issues, be it in pay, roles, representation etc.

As an industry, we cannot just pay lip service to addressing gap issues, we need to demonstrate action. Like in most creative industries, it is the sub texts that impact the most. The research team discovered the areas where the bias against women is the greatest.

Age: Women in ads are mostly in their 20s while men are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. This means male characters are far more diverse than female when it comes to age.

Humor: Men are almost twice as likely to be funny than women.

Objectification: One-in-ten female characters are shown in sexually revealing clothing – six times the number of male characters.

Intelligence: When it comes to characters for whom intelligence is an integral part of their character (e.g., a doctor, a scientist), men are 62% more likely to be shown as smart.

Location: Women are 48% more likely to be shown in the kitchen while men are 50% more likely to be shown at a sporting event.

Work: One in three men are shown with an occupation compared to one in four women.

Findings like these should inform some kind of change strategy in our industry.

The research was led by the Institute and J. Walter Thompson, and conducted by Dr. Shri Narayanan, Krishna Somadepalli and the team of Engineers at the University of Southern California’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL), in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Heldman and the team of researchers at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

The study, called Unpacking Gender Bias in Advertising, analysed more than 2,000 films from the Cannes Lions English Language archive.