Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

constant, sexual illustrations had become more overt and the tendency to present sexual content in visualrather than verbal form had increased. Further, females were more likely than males to be portrayed insexually suggestive ways.In the same decade, Lyonski (1985) undertook a content analysis ofadvertisement in 22 magazines from 1974-1975 and 1979-1980 and found that stereotyping had declinedmarginally.Gender role stereotyping in the 1990s. While they recognized the valuable research that had beenundertaken on gender portrayals since the 1970s, Plous and Neptune (1997) were of the view that previousstudies had some major limitations. They sought to explore the possibility that racial and gender bias wasincreasing in magazine advertisements. Using a sample of 1800 print advertisement drawn from 1985-1994 issues of two predominantly White female fashion magazines, two predominantly Black femalefashion magazines, and two predominantly White male fashion magazines, they found that regardinggender biases, female body exposure was greater than male exposure by a ratio of 4 to 1, suggesting that―…gender biases in magazine advertising persisted, and in some cases increased, between the mid-1980sand mid 1990s‖ (Plous & Neptune, 1997, p. 627).Klassen et al.(1993) contributed to the study of gender portrayals in advertisements byinvestigating how men and women, together, were portrayed. They examined a total of 3550advertisements drawn from issues of specific magazines from 1972-1989 and found that the proportion ofadvertisements with traditional poses had decreased while the proportion of reverse-sex poses and equalityposes had increased. Overall, there was also evidence that traditional depictions of women had beendeclining since the early 1980s. Equality portrayals on the other hand had been increasing as other studieshad also suggested.Gender role stereotyping in the 2000s. The interest in gender issues continued in the 2000s.Ahmed et al. (2004) published the results of a study whose objective was to determine if females andmales were equally likely to be featured in cardiovascular advertisements. Ahmed et al. (2004) drew asample of 919 unique advertisements which they examined for factors including gender, age, race, and theroles of the primary figure and the majority of the people featured in the advertisements. They concluded