Brands Fail to Invest in Women: Analysing Representation in Advertising
Despite progress, gender inequality in advertising persists — and it’s worse for older and darker-skinned women.
Written by
Isobel Bruce
March 8, 2024
5
min read
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You can download the 2024 Gender in Advertising Report to read the findings in full.
Headlines from the past 12 months give the impression that women are on track for total world domination. Taylor Swift was Time’s Person of the Year, smashing records with her Eras Tour, Barbie was the highest-grossing film of 2023, and women’s sports achieved new viewership highs during the Women’s World Cup and WNBA finals.
More women than ever are the main breadwinner of their homes, and women control a third of financial assets in the US, with a combined worth of over $10 trillion.
Perhaps the clearest demonstration of women’s perceived rise in power can be found in men’s interpretations of gender balance. Ipsos research has found that in the UK, three in ten young men believe it will be harder to be a woman than a man in 20 years. They were almost twice as likely to hold this viewpoint than the UK public as a whole.
But for all of their successes, women around the world remain over a century and a half away from gender equality. No country has achieved full gender equality to date, fewer than a third of UN member states have ever had a female leader and at the current pace the next generation of women is projected to spend an average of 2.3 more hours per day on unpaid care and domestic work than men.
In the advertising space, brands have made some progress towards inclusive representation on screen. In 2018 female characters were 5X more likely to be cooking in Mars Food ads than in 2023, but in 2022 male characters were shown cooking twice as often as female characters. Unilever worked with the Unstereotype Alliance to remove stereotypes across its content, with 60% of ads marked as strongly progressive in 2020.
But with women occupying an increasingly important position as consumers, the industry isn’t moving fast enough. All consumers (regardless of gender) place importance on representation in advertising. Kantar analysis determined that 52% “trust a brand more if it reflects culture.” Progressive ads deliver a 13% uplift in purchase intent and increase credibility by around a third.
Determining the extent to which an ad accurately reflects culture requires objective measurement. CreativeX used the world’s largest creative database to analyze over 32,000 ads supported by over $260 million in ad spend from 2023 to determine how inclusive content was in 2023.
On the surface, the analysis would appear to be overwhelmingly positive for women, who were featured in more ads than men (56% v. 42%). But crucially, it’s not about just featuring women, it’s about the intersecting identities of the women that are featured, and how they are portrayed.
Selected findings from the 2023 Gender in Advertising Report are included below. To discover the findings in full, download the report here.
Women stuck at home in adland
Despite women’s increased presence in the workforce, in ads, men are 23% more likely to appear in professional roles than women. By comparison, women are still most often portrayed in family settings.
Women enjoyed a year of sporting highs in 2023, with a huge increase in interest in watching women play football, basketball, and athletics. However, men were still 82% more likely to be portrayed in physical (sporting) roles than women.
Investment into less stereotypical roles
While women continued to be cast in more stereotypical roles, ad spend behind more progressive portrayals increased astronomically year on year. Portrayals in leadership and professional roles saw a 493% and 395% respective increase in investment.
Monika Tomala, Senior Manager Media and Marketing Operations at Vodafone commented, “With the EU employment rate for women nearing 70%, I was encouraged by the findings in the CreativeX report indicating an uptick in brands media investment towards showcasing women in professional and leadership roles in advertising, and I hope this will soon be the case for working women in physical roles too. With advertising, we have this amazing opportunity to utilize our voices to promote real, authentic representation. Let’s keep using it.”
Casting women in non-stereotypical roles has been shown to drive improvements across key short and long-term metrics. Pedr Howard, Head of Creative Excellence, Ipsos, commented: “Based on findings from our Ipsos and SeeHer whitepaper on gender equality in advertising, ads that show women challenging stereotypes, are 1.7x more likely to score in the top third for the positive portrayal of women, as measured by the Gender Equality Measure®. We know that ads that deliver elevated depictions of women are significantly more likely to drive short-term sales and build a stronger long-term relationship with the brand.”
Older women remain invisible in advertising
Forbes has called women over 50 "super consumers," because, with "over $15 trillion in purchasing power, they are the healthiest, wealthiest and most active generation in history.” But despite their outsized purchasing power, people over the age of 60 featured in less than 2% of ads in 2023, and spend on portrayals of older people fell year-on-year.
When older men and women are cast it is most often in stereotypical roles. Older men were 3X more likely to be in leadership roles and older women were two times more likely to be in domestic roles.
Eleanor Mills, the founder of Noon, a community dedicated to helping women in mid-life, commented on the findings. “We badly need a change in the way society views older women – that perception is still stuck in the dark ages when in reality midlife women now are a pioneering generation; over half are the breadwinner in their family, for the first time ever we out-earn women under 40 – yet we are still dismissed and ignored.”
“Noon research shows that university-educated women would be 68% more likely to buy from a brand that represents them authentically and that half of queenagers feel invisible to brands. The opportunity here is enormous.”
Black and brown women continue to be overlooked
Women with darker skin tones were the least represented skin type in 2023. While representation of women with darker skin tones in ads increased by 63%, this only amounted to 21% of total ads featuring women.
When darker-skinned women did appear in ads, they were more likely to be cast in stereotypical settings. Lighter-skinned women appeared over five times more in professional settings and seven times more in leadership roles compared to darker-skinned women.
Brands not only failed to invest in the casting of women of color, but they also reduced the amount of spend on ads featuring women with darker skin tones. In 2023, women with the darkest skin tone received only 2.6% of total ad spend.
In order to improve representation, brands need measurement. As She Runs It president and CEO Lynn Branigan puts it: “Measurement is essential. And we have arrived at a moment in time when meaningful change is possible through data. With more data comes more progress.”
CreativeX’s research was carried out using the world’s largest creative database. Big brands have been building creative databases to track content at scale and gain insights into everything from digital suitability to content activation. However the potential of a creative database goes beyond these activations. As Anastasia Leng, CreativeX’s Founder points out, “Change doesn’t happen overnight, and it requires ongoing measurement to drive sustainable progress.”
Brands need to look not only at the content of their ads but the makeup of their teams. Zara Ineson, who championed women in mid-life in her work with House337 and JD Williams, believes that without representative teams, brands will continue to let down consumers.
“To make meaningful progress when it comes to more visible and authentic representation of all women in advertising, we need to look inward at our teams because who makes the work shapes the work. We have an ageism & inclusivity issue in our industry and in our agencies, and it’s showing up on our tellies, billboards, and social feeds. So ask yourself this; are the right people around the table creating briefs, generating ideas, challenging clients, writing scripts, choosing cast, directing ads? Diverse teams make stuff that push the narrative forward and there is nothing more powerful than a client/agency team who have lived experience of the story they are telling.”
Women comprise just 35% of the marketing, media and ad tech sector, down from 46% in 2021, according to the She Runs It #Inclusive100 survey. Brands need to examine the makeup of their teams as well as the content they produce to push for more inclusive content.
The picture for women in advertising in 2023 wasn’t all doom and gloom, but the gains made didn’t reach women with darker skin or elderly women. This underscores that the more intersectional an identity, the heightened inequality they face.
Debbie Tembo, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Partnerships Director at Creative Equals, provided a pathway forward for brands and individuals: “To create authentically inclusive work, you need to be brave. Tell real stories about real people that challenge stereotypes. Understand where bias shows up in the work and use the opportunity to unlearn and relearn as a way to create more inclusive marketing that can grow your brand and make an impact in society.”
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