Gender Stereotypes

The Miss Representation documentary film by Jennifer Newsom explores how media contributes to the under-representation of women in influential positions. This message is portrayed by delivering content through media and technology as well as advertising partial and/or often degrading interpretations of women. The consequences are becoming more and more dreadful. In today’s world, composed of a million stations, people will tend to do more and more shocking things to break through the crowds. They resort to violent, sexually offensive, or demeaning images. Jean Kilbourne, EdD, filmmaker, Killing Us Softly Author and Senior Scholar Wellesley Center’s for Women states, that “it creates a climate in which

As society advances and the opinions of the general public change several press outlets work to stay up to date with the changing times. However, in an attempt to stay modernized journalists often times sacrifice their integrity to stay favorable in the public eye. These degrading actions, often times sacrifice the true news for more appealing news. Clare Boothe Luce, American journalist and politician, gives a controversial speech to the Women’s National Press Club condemning her female audience. Moreover, as a female addressing an audience of women she is able to give her true opinion and is able to honestly critique her colleagues. She persuades her audience by preparing them for the criticism by reiterating that she is the guest, by praising journalism, and by logically providing reasoning that the journalistic view must change for the good of the general public.

How women are perceived by others, and how women perceive themselves, impacts their leadership roles in the work place. Stereotypes and gender biases are themes women have been dealing with for centuries. How women are perceived by social medial and television have been influencing how they are treated by men, and how they view themselves when it comes to taking a leadership role in their organization. According to Omega Institute (2012), “The rapidly shifting landscape of new media and technology, including reality television and celebrity culture, continue to reinforce gender stereotypes” (p. 1). This leads to men still growing up viewing women as home makers versus bread winner. With more women entering leadership roles in the work place they lack the respect from men due to how these men have grown up to know the typical role of a man and woman. Men tend to feel belittled due to the gender stereotypes seen on television, and this leads to women struggling to succeed as a leader with the lack of support from their male counterparts. Lack of confidence with women in the workplace is also influenced and effected by how women are perceived in social media and television. According to Steele (2005), “Exposure to stereotypic commercials persuade women to avoid leadership roles” (p. 276). As young women grow up seeing the typical gender stereotypes they lack ambitions to break the mold and

The fact that Media are so derogatory to the most powerful women in the country, then what does it say about media’s ability to take any women in America seriously - Jennifer Posner (Executive Director, Women in Media & News, Author, Reality Bites Back

Although Barbara Walters would later downplay her relationship with the feminist movement, her early career is marked by a number of moves that were in part responsible for breaking down the all-male facade of U.S. network news. A Today Show regular for 15 years, including two years as the show’s first official female co-host, she was a visible presence in, at first, the program’s “feature” segments, then going on to covering “hard news”–including serving as part of the NBC News team sent to cover President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1972. Her most controversial “first” involved her decision in 1976 to leave Today to co-anchor the ABC Evening News with Harry Reasoner (the first time a woman was allowed the privileged position of network evening anchor) for a record-breaking seven-figure salary. Public reaction to both her salary and approach to the news, which critics claimed led to

In 1959, the National Press Club barred women as members. She led her fellow female journalists fought for admission and forced the National Press Club to allow them to attend. She was the first woman wrote about presidents and wrote aggressively about politics, in addition, the first woman in some previously male-only positions in the National Press Club and White House(Sullivan, 1993). These accomplishments in journalism would surprise and dismay any journalist—whether male or female. Helen fought against conventional wisdom about female journalists, earning herself as well as other female journalists an equal position with male journalists.

As a political science student in an election year, Washington, D.C. was the dream destination. There, I took a journalism seminar with Professor Gil Klein, a former president of the National Press Club. I also interned with PBS and worked on To the Contrary, a weekly show that discusses “her” view. Four women, two from each of the main parties, would discuss news and controversial issues. I wrote several episodes for the show, authored articles for the website, and curated content across social media

Reading Chapter 11: Gendered media reminded me why I majored in communications. The media has such a significant influence on all our lives. I wanted to be a part of that influence and to ultimately help turn the way society portrays people. The media’s influence can get into a person’s subconscious, and unwillingly it will control how we think and what we view as important. I would like to think I am not effected by the media, but I am. I tend to not settle for local news, I always make the effort to stay current on what is going on a global scale through different media outlets. With the rise of fake news I am constantly forced to question these sources and the agenda behind these new stories. It hurts me that in the United States we focus

Chapman, Taylor M. Women in American Media: A Culture of Misperception. Student Pulse, 2011. Web. 7 Mar.

When women first aired on television, they were seen as housewives and mothers. Few had jobs. Most of the women had husbands that worked hard everyday, and they had submissive roles. Women were not the decision makers, nor did they have too much intelligence. This was seen in shows such as All in the Family, The Beavers, The Donna Reed Show, The Brady Bunch, and many more. There were not any female news anchors, and when they were on television they did cooking shows, and perhaps the weather. As time moved on and the Women Movement began, women became working mothers; still they had lower roles, such as secretarial ones, and factory jobs. Presently women have been portrayed as more career oriented. They are doctors and lawyers, managers, and television anchors. There are also many shows where women are more independent. Many are not married, some are single mothers, and some are even divorced. This was a positive change, but yet it does hold some media bias. The problem is whether these changes occurred because of a societal shift, or was this because people who invested in the media saw this happening, wanted ratings, and felt that this must be done and in turn society began to shift their way of thinking about women; or was it a combination of both?

For this assignment I chose to watch the documentary Miss Representation. This is a documentary presented on Netflix which addresses the issue of how current mainstream media has become a frequent source for a despairing portrayal of women, specifically women in leadership roles, and how this type of portrayal has led to the underrepresentation of women in powerful positions. This topic is particularly interesting to me as it has become a greater issue in how society views women. I have always noticed the way in which wide stream media represent women, but it became increasingly clear to me when we had a woman running to be the new President of the United States. Within the course of Hillary Clintons campaign, I saw repeated media

Media coverage has continued to stigmatize female candidates into their best fitting descriptions of stereotypes, and as a result, female candidate ambition has decline rapidly. My research question is “does negative media coverage affect women’s expressed levels of ambition to run for political office?”. Studies have already shown that females are less ambitious than males, and just having the courage to run for a political position is a huge step. Although women have been becoming more politically active in some ways than males, media still manages to display negative images towards females. An interesting article that I found out on CNN, was about CNN Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger, titled CNN’s Borger: Best Way to Defeat a Woman Is to Portray Her as ‘Emotional Wreck’, arguing that by perceiving a woman as an emotional wreck, it will hurt her chances of holding an office

“People learn more from media than any other single source of information” (Missrepresentation). This quote exemplifies how society learns and creates their standards about people, places, and things. All sources and mediums of media impact billions of lives every day. The media holds this power over society and it’s time to change that; especially when it comes to the media’s view of women. Women are constantly being misrepresented. This misrepresentation of women in the media is negatively impacting America by corrupting both the youth and adults. This is occurring because of the hyper-sexualization of women, wrongly portraying women in leadership positions, and creating stereotypes of women in movies and television.

In the 21st century, we see women in the media have many roles that men have, such as, police officer, doctor and running to become president, while a nurse and teacher have emerged as both men and women jobs. Over time, the media show how gender role had changed but are what the media is showing the truth about the gender roles in the United States. Historian and scholar had written about this subject of gender roles and how the media affect our view.

In our society today, media acts as an integral factor in creating and undoing social bonds, as well as communicating topics which enable social transformation. It is generally considered that political and economic subjects are rational and thus are treated as ‘men’s issues’, in comparison to social and cultural themes expressed as sensitive and accordingly correlated with femininity (Stevenson 1995). Although this is open to much criticism in terms of gender inequality, it is undoubtable that gender equality is progressing. Women have enrolled into conventionally male-dominated work places, reflecting the general consensus that women achieve better at school. Also, men have proceeded into ‘normally’ female-dominated areas such as