Where’s the Intersectionality When It Comes to Women on Screen?

Compare the advertising of the 50s and 60s and today and you might think that we’ve come a long way from the slim, white housewives, awestruck and enamoured by their cleaning products. But two new research projects released today suggest that we might want to pause and take a more nuanced view before giving ourselves a big old pat on the back.

With differing methodologies and data sets, the separate research from Kantar and CreativeX don’t necessarily give exactly matching figures but they do both point to the same overall trends and are useful to triangulate with each other. For one thing, it shows that, no, this isn't a random data artifact. It's really happening.

Data and insights consulting company Kantar has revealed a mixture of hope and despair in its research. They’ve found that just 16% of ads globally show women with different body types - though things are looking up in the UK, where that figure is nearly double that with 31%. In the UK again, more ads are showing women over 40. 28% of UK ads, in fact - and that’s up from 21% in 2022 - and globally 25% of ads feature women in that age range.

It isn’t all rosy, however, because these women are overwhelmingly in traditional gender roles, portrayed as nurses and caregivers. Only 8% show women breaking the mould. Major categories like cars, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, financial services and tech still favour positive portrayals of men over positive portrayals of women - the only category where positive portrayals of women dominate is personal care.

 

So what’s with this persistence of traditional gender roles? Kantar’s head of creative excellence, Lynne Deason, says, “Stereotypes are familiar and can feel like a safe option for advertisers, but we know that ‘safe’ doesn’t deliver great returns.  Braver, more progressive choices help ads to cut through and earn audiences’ attention.  When done right, they are more engaging and memorable, and they make consumers feel favourable towards the brand.  Moving away from stereotypes can feel like a risk, and this is where research comes in – to provide a nuanced understanding of the people being portrayed and enable evidenced, informed and more effective decisions around gender roles, which ultimately are a better investment for your brand and for society.”

Things get even more concerning when you compare this data to that from AI-powered consultancy, CreativeX. They analysed over 32,000 ads that were funded by $260 million in ad spend in 2023. If Kantar’s research shows an uptick in women over 40 being represented in commercials, CreativeX reveals that it plummets when it comes to women in the 60+ category. Only 1.5% of ads globally show women in their 60s and above - while 25% of ads show men in the same age category.

That reflects what Kantar found too, when they broke down their data. They found that both in the UK and globally, only 4% of ads showed women aged 65 or above, with 26% showing a woman aged 40 to 64. Looking at their, though, older men, only 5% of ads globally and in the UK featured a man in the 65+ bracket compared to 30% with men aged 40-64.

When it comes to women in traditional roles, CreativeX’s data shows a slightly higher overall percentage of women in non-traditional roles. It’s still low, with just 8.5% of ads showing women in professional settings and 3.4% in positions of leadership, but they did find that women in stereotypically traditional roles had decreased between 2022 and 2023 from 66% to 30%.

What CreativeX’s research also revealed was that colourism is rife in advertising. Women with darker skin tones were the least represented skin type in 2023. While the representation of women with darker skin tones in ads has grown by 63% year-on-year, it nonetheless only counted for 21% of global ads in 2023. In fact, lighter-skinned women appeared almost four times more frequently.

Where it gets even more insidious is that it’s not just that women with darker skin and older women are less likely to be present in ads; when they are present, they’re far more likely than their lighter-skinned and younger counterparts to be shown in traditional roles. So lighter skinned women are five times more likely to be portrayed as professionals. Old women are twice as likely as old men to be shown in caring roles. And even more galling, where older women and those with darker skin are present in ads, those ads tend to have less media spend behind them.

According to CreativeX, just 2.6% of total ad spend goes to ads with women with the darkest skin tone, and that spend has shrunk 9% year-on-year, while ads featuring people over 60 received just 1.2% of total global ad spend.

There’s a lot to unpick from here - not least the missed commercial opportunity. But it also reveals that the advertising world has been somewhat blunt and lacking in nuance when it comes to casting, and certainly slow to consider how different characteristics and identities intersect with each other. The choices made inadvertently continue to marginalise the most marginalised - while disability was not a characteristic studied by either projects undoubtedly the findings would be even more depressing and disproportionate.

Anastasia Leng, the CEO at CreativeX says that she hopes this data will force people in the advertising and marketing world to confront their biases head on: “For years, the lack of progress on representative advertising has been blamed on a lack of data, which hindered our ability to quantify the gap between where we wanted to be and where we were. Our industry dedicated lots of air time to talking about the problem, so many assumed we were getting better at inclusively representing people in ads,” she says.

“Well, the data’s here and it shows yet again that intent isn’t translating to action. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and it requires ongoing measurement to drive sustainable progress. Advancements in technology now enable us to track and measure the creative decisions we’re making, in near real-time, including breaking out how we’re casting and portraying people in ads and determining if those decisions map to what we know about our consumers and our markets’ changing demographic trends.”

What the data also shows is that positive representation of people from underrepresented demographics also makes a difference when it comes to effectiveness. “The evidence speaks for itself – campaigns which portray people positively are more effective,” says Lynne.  “Amazon’s most recent Christmas ad ‘Joy Ride’ is a great example. The ad, which spotlighted the ways older women can still have as much fun as the rest of us, scored in the top 2% of all UK ads on positive portrayal of women – it also came in the top 4% for brand power and top 6% on being different. With many advertisers under pressure to make the most of budgets during the cost-of-living squeeze, marketers can’t afford to ignore these kinds of metrics.”

But even the Amazon 'Joy Ride' campaign isn't necessarily as intersectional as it could be and misses on an opportunity to expand the representation of more diverse older women too.

Adland’s allergy to ageing women, women with darker skin, and - in certain markets - women with diverse body types reveals an industry that’s still as keen as ever to force women into restrictive and one-dimensional boxes.