Examples of Gender Typical Roles in Magazine Advertisements

Most people tend to believe that things such as modern-day magazines advertisements and television commercials are beyond such silly things as gender stereotyping, but I’d like to point out a few advertisements that recently caught my eye in a popular magazine. Keep in mind that this type of gender stereotyping isn’t generally presented in any type of negative way towards the opposing sex, it simply focuses on gender typical roles in order to attempt to make sales.

Print Advertisement: Clorox Clean-Up

This ad depicts a woman stretching an electrical cord from one room to another to plug it in; while she’s doing this she is unknowingly wrapping the cord around a shelf with several plants on it, obviously getting ready to make a mess by knocking all of them over into her clean white floor. The advertisement says „Clorox Clean-Up Cleaner with Bleach – Cleans it all up.“ This is a basic typical gender stereotype suggesting women do all of the cleaning.

Print Advertisement: Ridgid Lithium Ion Xli Battery & Power Tools/Home Depot

This ad depicts a man drilling into a wall-stud with a big battery powered drill while he builds a house. The advertisement is 24-volt power tools from a company named RIDGID sold at The Home Depot. This is also a very typical gender stereotype of men working with power tools.

Although these ads do seem to follow the gender typical roles, I believe this is mostly because of the roles men and women have already been assigned. Just like it doesn’t make much sense for toy companies to try to sell or advertise unisex or cross-gender toys, I don’t think it would be a very economically sound decision to try to manufacture power tools to females or cleaning supplies to men – and that isn’t because women can’t use power tools, or that men can’t clean, just simply because your typical men would be more interested in a new power tool, and women like to find things that makes their cleaning duties easier, and that is because of what line of work they do, or because of what chores they have to do at home, not because of what they want to do or can do.