Women in advertisements have been portrayed through a remarkably narrow lens for decades, cycling between a handful of recurring roles: the dutiful homemaker, the sex object, the beauty-obsessed consumer. Research consistently documents that these stereotypes persist even as societies have evolved, though the specific patterns have shifted over time. The emergence of so-called “femvertising” has added a new layer to the picture, but it coexists with longstanding objectification, and the effects of all these portrayals on real people are measurable.
Traditional Stereotypes Have Proven Stubbornly Persistent
Studies going back to the 1970s identified a core set of roles assigned to women in ads: the housewife, the woman dependent on male protection, and the sexually available figure. A retrospective analysis of decades of print advertising research found that while you might expect a decrease in these portrayals given shifts in gender roles across society, “this does not seem to be the case.” Female stereotyping in advertising remains widespread, though it now manifests in different types and patterns than it did a generation ago.1Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences. Female Stereotypes in Print Advertising: A Retrospective Analysis The housewife trope may appear less frequently in some markets, but it has been replaced by equally reductive portrayals: the impossibly toned fitness enthusiast, the corporate superwoman who still manages domestic perfection, or the woman whose primary narrative purpose is to look desirable.
One of the more striking findings in recent research is that a country’s actual level of gender equality has little bearing on how stereotypically its advertisements depict women. A large cross-national content analysis covering 13 countries across Asia, the Americas, and Europe found that gender stereotyping in television ads was statistically independent of multiple national gender-equality indices. Countries that scored well on measures of real-world gender parity still ran ads that leaned heavily on traditional gender roles.2PubMed Central. Gender-Role Portrayals in Television Advertising Across the Globe That finding undercuts the comfortable assumption that advertising simply mirrors the culture around it. The global ad industry seems to have its own internal logic, one that recycles gendered imagery regardless of what is happening outside the studio.
Objectification and the Power of the Camera
A large body of work connects the way women are filmed and photographed in ads to a concept originally developed in film theory: the idea that the camera positions the viewer as a voyeur, with women arranged for visual consumption. A study that analyzed a range of commercial advertisements through this framework found consistent patterns. Women were presented in sexually suggestive poses and attire, with camera angles and framing designed to direct the viewer’s attention to specific body parts rather than to the woman as a whole person.3The Creative Launcher. Gaze and Glamour: Analyzing Commercial Advertisements through Laura Mulvey’s Lens
The same study found that advertisements consistently depicted a power imbalance, with men positioned as dominant figures and women placed in subordinate roles. This was not limited to overtly sexual product categories. The visual language of subordination, where a woman tilts her head, reclines while a man stands, or touches her own face and body in a way that signals passivity, cuts across product types. These compositional choices reinforce traditional gender norms in ways that can be difficult to notice consciously but are well documented in research.
How Stereotyped Ads Affect the People Who See Them
The psychological consequences of exposure to sexually objectifying advertisements have been measured in controlled experiments. One study exposed participants to ads featuring sexually objectified women and found that body dissatisfaction increased for both women and men, though the effect was larger for women. People who had already internalized cultural appearance ideals were hit hardest: those with higher internalization of thinness or attractiveness norms experienced greater dissatisfaction after viewing the images.4Body Image. The effects of advertisements that sexually objectify women on state body dissatisfaction and judgments of women: The moderating roles of gender and internalization
You might hope that labeling retouched images or adding health warnings would blunt the effect. An experiment with over 340 female undergraduates tested exactly that. Participants saw thin-model images accompanied by either a disclaimer noting the photo had been retouched, a warning that trying to look that thin could be dangerous, or no label at all. None of the labeling strategies reduced body dissatisfaction. Only the control group, which viewed images of cars instead of models, reported a decrease in dissatisfaction over the course of the experiment.5PubMed. Effects of exposure to thin-ideal media images on body dissatisfaction: testing the inclusion of a disclaimer versus warning label That is a sobering result for anyone banking on disclosure labels as a meaningful intervention.
These effects have migrated to social media in predictable ways. An experiment on Instagram influencer content found that viewing images of influencers led to greater negative mood, body dissatisfaction, self-objectification, and appearance comparison than viewing neutral control images. Sexualized influencer images performed even worse than standard fashion images on those measures.6PubMed. Comparing and self-objectifying: The effect of sexualized imagery posted by Instagram Influencers on women’s body image The blurring of advertising and personal content on platforms like Instagram means that the exposure is now constant and harder to identify as commercial messaging.
The Femvertising Movement and Its Credibility Problem
Starting roughly in the mid-2010s, brands began producing advertisements explicitly designed to challenge gender stereotypes and celebrate women’s empowerment. This approach picked up its own label: femvertising. These campaigns frequently defy stereotypes and portray women in powerful and competent roles, repositioning female characters as agents rather than objects.7International Research Journal of Business Studies. Role of Femvertising in Enhancing Women’s Empowerment in FMCG Brand Campaigns Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, Always’s “#LikeAGirl,” and Nike’s ads featuring diverse female athletes are among the most visible examples.
But a growing body of criticism questions whether many of these campaigns are genuinely motivated or simply exploiting feminist language to sell products. The gap between sincere empowerment and surface-level appropriation has been labeled “femwashing,” and research suggests consumers can smell the difference. One analysis found that authenticity is the single most important factor determining whether a femvertising campaign succeeds or backfires. When consumers perceive a campaign as inauthentic, it leads to public distrust and skepticism about the brand, ultimately hurting purchase intentions rather than helping them.8Journal of Media Research. Femvertising or Femwashing? A Theoretical Perspective on the Impact of Authenticity on Consumer Purchase Intentions A brand that runs an empowerment ad while simultaneously underpaying its female workforce or promoting unrealistic beauty standards in other product lines invites exactly that kind of backlash.
Does Empowerment Advertising Actually Change Consumer Behavior?
When femvertising is perceived as authentic, the commercial payoff is real. A series of four experimental studies found that diversity in empowerment-themed ads enhances brand perceptions and purchase intentions, with the effect driven by perceived brand authenticity.9Psychology & Marketing. Diversity in Femvertising: An Experimental Investigation In other words, it is not just the empowerment message that matters but the diversity of the women shown delivering it. An ad featuring a narrow slice of conventionally attractive women mouthing empowerment slogans reads as hollow; an ad featuring women of varying ages, body types, and backgrounds reads as credible.
A separate study tested how femvertising plays in a country with a relatively low gender equality index, Hungary, focusing on Generation Y consumers. Even in that context, the empowerment-themed ads generated favorable evaluative responses. Perceived female empowerment improved attitudes toward both the ad and the brand, which translated into higher purchase intentions.10International Journal of Consumer Studies. Do Consumer Attitudes Toward Gender Equality Matter? Brand‐Related Consumer Responses to Femvertising in a Country With a Low Gender Equality Index That finding suggests the appeal of seeing women portrayed with dignity is not confined to already-progressive markets. It resonates broadly, even where the surrounding culture has not fully caught up.
Representation Gaps That Go Beyond Thinness
Much of the conversation about women in advertising focuses on body size and sexual objectification, but the representation failures run wider. Older women, for instance, carry what researchers describe as a stigmatized identity in advertising and are severely underrepresented in ads across all media types around the world.11International Journal of Advertising. Exploring how older women want to be portrayed in advertisements When they do appear, they tend to be confined to pharmaceutical or insurance ads, rarely showing up in fashion, technology, or lifestyle categories. Brands have been urged to increase the presence of older women, but there has been surprisingly little research asking older women themselves how they want to be depicted.
Body size representation has received more commercial attention in recent years. Research on the effects of featuring plus-size models in advertising found that doing so enhanced brand evangelism among consumers. The mechanism was consumer empowerment: seeing a body type closer to their own made viewers feel recognized and valued, which translated into enthusiasm for the brand. The effect was strongest among people with higher levels of empathy, who experienced a heightened sense of empowerment from the inclusive messaging.12Psychology & Marketing. Empowered by representation: How plus‐size models create brand evangelists
Representation of LGBTQ+ women adds yet another dimension. Research on viewer perceptions of lesbian characters in advertising found that lesbian women have historically appeared less often than gay men, and when they do appear, their portrayal has frequently leaned on hypersexualized imagery aimed at appealing to heterosexual male viewers rather than reflecting the actual lives of queer women.13Poetics. Advertising has come out: Viewers’ perception of the portrayal of lesbian, gay, and transgender characters in advertising When researchers showed participants ads that featured lesbian couples in understated, everyday scenarios (a wedding, watching an ultrasound together), many viewers preferred these normalized depictions precisely because homosexuality was presented as “something more normal” rather than being treated as the ad’s spectacle. The implication is that audiences are ready for queer women to simply exist in ads without their identity being the punchline or the selling point.
Algorithmic Bias Shapes Who Sees What
Even when an ad is well made and non-stereotypical, the systems that deliver it can introduce their own gender bias. A study examining Facebook’s ad delivery across 191 countries found that women were significantly less likely than men to be shown a STEM career advertisement. Men saw roughly 20% more impressions of the ad overall, and the gap was largest for younger women: women aged 25 to 34 were about 40% less likely than men of the same age to see the STEM ad.14Social Science Research Network. Algorithmic Bias? An Empirical Study into Apparent Gender-Based Discrimination in the Display of STEM Career Ads
The researchers attributed this not to the algorithm explicitly discriminating against women but to a market-driven spillover effect. Because women in that age bracket are more likely to convert an ad view into an actual purchase, competing advertisers drive up the cost of reaching them. A STEM career ad running on a limited budget gets priced out of that demographic and ends up shown disproportionately to men. The result is the same as if someone had deliberately targeted men: women see fewer career ads, reinforcing the very pipeline problem the ad was trying to address. The discrimination is structural rather than intentional, but the outcome for women scrolling through their feeds is identical.
Who Makes the Ads Shapes What They Look Like
The advertising industry itself has a well-documented gender imbalance, particularly in creative departments. Research into agency staffing found a concrete connection between female leadership and broader female representation. When at least one woman held a creative management role within an agency network, the number of women in lower-level creative positions doubled compared to departments led exclusively by male managers.15Gender in Management. Female creative managers as drivers for gender diversity in advertising creative departments: a critical mass approach The study used a critical mass framework: it was not about having a single token woman but about reaching a threshold of female presence in decision-making roles that shifts the departmental culture enough to make it viable for other women to enter and stay.
This matters for what ends up on screen. Creative teams shape everything from casting decisions to camera angles to the narrative structure of a 30-second spot. A department where every decision-maker is male is more likely to default to visual conventions that treat women as decorative elements, not because individual men are villains but because those conventions feel normal when no one in the room experiences them differently. Diversifying creative leadership does not guarantee better ads, but it removes one of the structural conditions that keeps stereotypical portrayals in production.
Where Your Eyes Actually Go When Viewing Ads
Eye-tracking technology offers a physiological window into how people process advertising images. A study of 80 young women viewing fashion advertisements found that participants looked at the model significantly longer and more frequently than at any other element of the ad, including the product and the brand logo.16Clothing and Textiles Research Journal. Fashion Advertisements and Young Women: Determining Visual Attention Using Eye Tracking What predicted how long someone stared at the model was not self-esteem or a general tendency to compare appearances, but specifically how much the viewer had internalized the thin ideal. Women who had absorbed cultural thinness standards spent more time fixated on the model’s body and reported higher levels of social comparison afterward. Eye movement and self-reported comparison were correlated, suggesting that the physical act of lingering on a model’s body and the psychological act of comparing yourself to her are closely linked.
More recent eye-tracking work has examined how women visually process the newer empowerment-themed advertisements. A study had 186 female participants view ads that combined empowerment captions with photographs while their gaze was tracked.17Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Measuring Gaze: Women’s Visual Processing of Empowerment and Objectification Messages in Empowerment-Themed Advertisements This line of research reflects a growing interest in understanding whether empowerment messaging actually changes how viewers engage with the image or whether the visual pull of idealized bodies overrides the verbal message. If your eyes still lock onto the model’s waist while the tagline says “You are enough,” the ad may be sending two messages at once, and the visual one tends to win.
The Complicated Case of Ads Featuring Lesbian Women
Advertising featuring same-sex female couples has increased over the past decade, but its execution varies dramatically. Some brands have used images of two women together primarily as a provocation or as a way to signal edginess, and research confirms that the default has often been hypersexualized imagery designed to appeal to a heterosexual male audience rather than to represent queer women’s lives.18Poetics. Advertising has come out: Viewers’ perception of the portrayal of lesbian, gay, and transgender characters in advertising The pattern mirrors the broader objectification problem: even when a marginalized group gains visibility, that visibility can be co-opted to serve the gaze the ad was always built around.
When researchers tested viewer reactions to ads that featured lesbian couples in ordinary domestic scenes, such as a Magnum ice cream ad showing a wedding and a Samsung ad showing a couple looking at an ultrasound image, many participants gravitated toward the versions where the couple’s sexuality was present but not centered as the ad’s main event. The preference was for normalization over spectacle. That finding parallels what the femvertising research shows about authenticity: audiences respond better when an ad treats its subjects as real people going about real life rather than as symbols deployed for a campaign message.