Italian creative agency The Big Now/mcgarrybowen (dentsu Italy) has released The Women’s Body Issue, a white paper dedicated to gender equality in adland.
According to the white paper, women face a lack of representation in all areas of the industry. Women make up 44 four per cent of sport participants, but only recieve four per cent of the media coverage.
Among Cannes Lions Award winner and nominees in the last 15 years, female characters were four times more likely than male characters to be shown in revealing clothes.
40 per cent of the women working in Adland who were surveyed said that they had experienced gender discrimination in the workplace.
Many felt that their ideas were often dismissed, and, only 15 per cent of creative directors worldwide are female.
For decades, society has enforced this volume of impossible, contradictory and limiting standards and roles for women and their bodies to achieve or look.
Advertising has been doing a fair amount of this work, too, in such subtle ways that we don’t even notice.
The results? A disproportionate underrepresentation of women, sexualization and body normativity adding up to one another ad after ad, and the gender gap still growing among us.
The whitepaper covers four main themes, including objectification and beauty standardisation to gender roles and sexual moralisation.
However, it also looks at the strategies that can confront those ideas, such as best practises and golden rules for brands and ads to move towards purposeful, inclusive feminist communication.
