Master Thesis
Cross-cultural differences in gender role portrayals
A comparison between web advertisements from the Netherlands and the
USA based on Hofstede's masculinity dimension
by Kevin de Waal University of Groningen Faculty of Economics and Business MSc International Business and Management
ABSTRACT
This study employed a quantitative content analysis to examine cross-cultural differences in gender role portrayals in web advertisements between the Netherlands and the USA on the basis of Hofstede’s masculinity dimension. The findings show that a greater percentage of Dutch advertisements featured women as a main character. Dutch advertisements also featured more characters in relationship themes whereas American advertisement featured more characters in productions situation. The results provide support for the application of Hofstede’s masculinity index into the determination of appropriate advertising appeals related to gender roles in different cultures.
Keywords: Masculinity and Femininity, Gender Roles, Web Advertisements, the Netherlands, United States of America.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First I would like to thank my supervisor drs. Huib Stek for his numerous valuable remarks, suggestions and improvements, enhancing the quality of my thesis. His insights and constructive comments put (and kept) me on the right track and supported me in the process of writing my thesis.
Next I want to express gratitude to Sophie, my girlfriend, for her love and her faith in me. She cheered me up whenever this was needed even though I spent a lot of time in the library finishing my thesis.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
Gender roles 6
Gender stereotypes and gender role portrayals in advertising 10
Cultural aspects of gender role portrayals in advertising 12
Methodology Sample Coding 17 17 19 Results 21 Discussion 26 Conclusion Limitation
Directions for future research
28 29 30
INTRODUCTION
Gender role portrayals in advertising have been an interesting subject for research the last decades because gender is one of the primary segmentation variables in marketing activities (An and Kim, 2007). Next to the analysis of the contribution of advertisements to viewers’ perception of social reality, social scientists have also analyzed the social and psychological effects of gender stereotyping in the media. These researchers found that women are not favorably represented in advertising and their roles are limitedly defined as playing subordinate, unimportant, and supporting roles, whereas men are shown in decidedly different ways playing important, professional, and autonomous roles (An and Kim, 2007; Bretl and Cantor, 1988; Courtney and Lockeretz, 1971).
As gender role portrayal has become an important issue in international advertising, researchers have become interested in the cross-cultural account of the societal roles attached to women and men in advertising (An and Kim, 2007). Although limited to magazine and television advertising, cross-cultural content-analytic studies have shown considerable consensus that the portrayals of women and men’s roles in advertising differ by culture (Furnham and Mak, 1999; Wiles and Tjernlund, 1991). This confirms the idea that advertising is culture-reflective or culture-bound of nature and that advertising is an important social institution that mirrors and transmits dominate cultural values in society (An and Kim, 2007). Specifically, the findings suggest that in a society where feminine values have a dominate influence on a culture, there tends to be less differences between women and men in the type of roles portrayed in advertising, whereas in a society where masculine values are dominant, there tends to be a large difference in the societal roles attached to women and men in advertising (Milner and Collins, 2000; Wiles et al., 1995).
comparisons are of a greater importance as they could benefit international advertisers with both practical and theoretical implications.
Most previous studies on the relation between cultural norms and the portrayals of men and women in advertising focused on television and magazine advertising (An and Kim, 2007). In order to get a complete picture of gender roles across a variety of media, and given the increasing importance of the internet as an advertising platform, web advertising is being worth studied. Many international advertisers use the web as a global advertising medium in their media mix because it is an easy way to reach customers all over the world. There have been few studies on the issue of gender role portrayal in web advertisements.
The Netherlands and the USA are selected to compare because the USA is by far the most frequently investigated country in cross-cultural advertising research (Sin et al. 2001) and is therefore interesting to use as research subject for web advertisements. The Netherlands is selected because it has one of the highest internet penetration rates in Europe (www.internetworldstats.com) and it has an open society with a mixture of cultures. When these countries are compared using Hofstede’s masculinity index the scores for both countries represent a big distance on the masculinity dimension. The score for the Netherlands for masculinity is 14 (rank 51 out of 53) and the score for masculinity the USA is 62 (rank 15). This study is the first to compare gender role portrayals in web advertising from these countries.
The research question of this study is: ―what are the cross-cultural differences in gender role portrayals in web advertisements in the Netherlands and the USA based on Hofstede's masculinity dimension?‖
order to get an insight in the way cultural differences influence advertisements. The methodology will be explained before the results, discussion and conclusion are presented.
GENDER ROLES
In order to answer the research question it is important to be aware of the differences between gender roles in societies. As mentioned before, gender roles are the starting point of the analysis of gender role portrayals. A gender role is a set of culturally defined behavioral norms associated with males and with females, respectively, in a given social group or system (An and Kim, 2007). Men and women can have different roles in different cultures. A role is essentially performative. One learns how to play a masculine or feminine role, what is acceptable and what is not, how one should behave, think, and evaluate oneself and others in a gendered manner. While age, ethnicity, class, and many other factors also have culturally prescribed norms, gender is the most universal and salient social organizing principle (An and Kim, 2007).
Over the previous century several articles have been published to explain the concept of gender roles. Parsons and Shillis (1951) state that the division of labor based upon sex has survived because it is beneficent and efficient for society. Stability in the family is maintained because one member, the male assumes the ―instrumental role‖ of breadwinner, while the female adopted the ―expressive role‖ of managing relationships within the family and keeping it together (An and Kim, 2007). The conflict theory of gender roles agrees with this idea of how gender roles developed, but disagrees as to why they have continued. The argument here is that such a division of labor is not necessarily beneficial to society, but has been maintained by those in power. Men want to keep things the way they are because they enjoy economic, political, and social privileges. According to the interactionist approach (Sandstrom et al., 2006) gender roles are not fixed, but are constantly negotiated between individuals.
These theories are complementary, but it is important to mention that gender roles are not the same all over the world. There are differences across the world in the way gender roles are divided. What is seen as a typical task for men or for women varies from one society to the other. We can classify societies on whether they try to minimize or to maximize the social sex role division. Some societies allow both men and women to take many different roles. Others make a sharp division between what men should do and what women should do. In this latter case, the distribution is always such that men take the more assertive and dominant roles and women the more service-oriented and caring roles. Societies with a maximized social sex role division are called masculine and those with a relatively small social sex role division feminine (Hofstede, 1983).
A person’s gender role is composed of several elements and can be expressed through clothing, behavior, choice of work, personal relationships and other factors. Gender roles were traditionally divided into strictly feminine and masculine gender roles, though these roles have diversified today into many different acceptable male or female gender roles (An and Kim, 2007). However, gender role norms for women and men can vary significantly from one country or culture to another, even within a country or culture.
inferior to men (Bretl and Cantor, 1988). However, since some cultures practice egalitarian value emphasizing the equality of genders, treatment of women, their relative power, and attitudes toward appropriate roles for women may differ across cultures (An and Kim, 2007). Among the several comprehensive dimensional frameworks that attempt to discover and empirically verify variations across cultures, Hofstede’s (2001) 5D model deals with the norms governing the societal roles attached to women and men.
Hofstede’s (2001) study yielded a structure comprised of five major dimensions on which societies would differ: power distance – societal desire for hierarchy or egalitarianism; individualism – societal preference for a group or individual orientation; masculinity – a gender-role differentiation; uncertainty avoidance – societal resistance to uncertainty and long-term orientation – fostering of virtues oriented towards future rewards or fostering of virtues related to the past and present. The model has been validated in hundreds of different cross-cultural studies from a variety of disciplines including sociology, market research, and medicine, and when compared to other models, Hofstede’s model is probably the one that has been most frequently tested and validated. The masculinity index, which will be used in this study, for example, was validated against country data from other large cross-national studies such as Schwartz’s Values Surveys and the European and World Values Surveys analyzed by Stoetzel and by Inglehart (Hofstede, 2001:279).
TABLE 1
Masculinity index values among 53 nations
Rank Country Score
GENDER STEREOTYPES AND GENDER ROLE PORTRAYALS IN ADVERTISING
In order to examine advertisements it is important to be aware of the relationship between gender roles in society and the gender role portrayals in advertisements. Stereotyping is often used in advertising. One example of this is that the focus is on one aspect of the gender roles that are present in a culture. Women are often portrayed in the kitchen or whilst they are washing clothes or cleaning the house. This is an example of emphasis on the caring role that women traditionally have in some cultures.
We can see different gender roles in societies and therefore as well in advertisements since they reflect society. According to Hofstede, ―the sex role distribution common in a particular society is transferred by socialization in families, schools, and peer groups, and through the media‖ (Wiles et al. 1995). Therefore advertisements can also have an (unintended) influence on the values of gender roles is societies. This is not the main goal of the advertisers because the main goal is concerned with selling more products and this goal will generally be met more easily when the advertisements are adapted to the governing values in societies.
As mentioned before, gender role portrayals in advertising often involves the use of gender stereotypes. These are general beliefs about gender-linked traits and gender roles. Stereotyping involves the assignment of an usually negative label to certain groups of people, based on a certain belief about how these people tend to behave. More specifically, gender stereotyping is concerned with the beliefs about why men and women differ (Odekerken-Schröder et al., 2002). Gender role depictions of women as dependent and emotional have been criticized for perpetuating stereotypes and having adverse effects on a wide range of behaviors (Bretl and Cantor, 1988).
account of the societal roles attached to women and men in advertising (An and Kim, 2007).
Jones (1991) describes the following categories of stereotyping:
functional ranking – the tendency to depict men in executive roles and as more functional when collaborating with women;
relative size – the tendency to depict men as taller and larger than women, except when women are clearly superior in social status;
ritualization of subordination – an overabundance of images of women lying on floors and beds or as objects of men’s mock assaults;
the feminine touch – the tendency to show women cradling and caressing the surface of objects with their fingers; and
family – fathers depicted as physically distant from their families or as relating primarily to sons, and mothers depicted as relating primarily to daughters.
According to Jones (1991), mass media is a widespread source of stereotypes that both reflects and shapes society. So gender roles in advertisements are based on gender roles in society and in turn also have effect on the gender roles in society by influencing the values and beliefs of people. This is also illustrated by an experiment designed by Jones (1991) in which students are asked to use their imagination to change the sex of the people in advertisements. The outcome of the experiment is that the students’ imaginary advertisements usually look unnatural, indicating that advertisements display men and women consistent with our cultural beliefs.
CULTURAL ASPECTS OF GENDER ROLE PORTRAYALS IN ADVERTISING
As gender role portrayal has become an important issue in international advertising researchers have become interested in the cross-cultural account of the societal roles attached to women and men in advertising. This chapter explores the cross-cultural perception of the societal gender roles in order to find out how these cultural differences are reflected in advertisements resulting into the hypotheses of this study. Although limited to magazine and television advertising, more than a dozen of cross-cultural content-analytic studies have shown considerable consensus that the portrayals of women and men’s roles in advertising differ by culture (Wiles and Tjernlund, 1991; An and Kim, 2007).
Advertising is culture-reflective of nature and according to Potter (1954) it is therefore an important social institution that mirrors and transmits dominate cultural values in society. Specifically, the findings of previous studies suggest that in a society where feminine values have a dominant influence on a culture, there tends to be less differences between women and men in the type of roles portrayed in advertising, whereas in a society where masculine values are dominant, there tends to be a large difference in the societal roles attached to women and men in advertising (Wiles et al., 1995; Milner and Collins, 2000). Wiles et al. (1995) found for example that that the more feminine nations in their study, Sweden and The Netherlands exhibited lower role portrayal differentiation between the genders than the more masculine country, the US. It appears that the more feminine a country, the greater is the likelihood of its culture to feature women as a main character in advertisements. For instance, Milner and Collins (2000) reported that the ratio of female characters to commercials was higher for Swedish (more feminine) advertisements than those for Russia (more masculine) and the USA (more masculine). Similarly, Wiles et al. (1995) found that advertisements from the Netherlands (more masculine) depicted men more often than females and the Swedish (more feminine) advertisements portrayed females more frequently than the Dutch advertisements (An and Kim, 2007).
important roles than women regardless of the masculine/feminine value orientation of the nations compared, while between-gender differences tend to be larger in masculine countries (Japan, USA, Mexico, Australia, and Malaysia) than in feminine countries (Sweden, The Netherlands, Singapore, and Taiwan) (An and Kim, 2007). Masculine countries like Japan and the USA are more likely to exhibit a sharp difference in the gender roles between women and men than feminine countries like Sweden and The Netherlands and, therefore, gender role differences portrayed in advertising would be larger in advertisements from masculine countries than those from feminine countries (An and Kim, 2007).
In summary we can say that the culture in a country influences the gender role portrayals in advertisements. Feminine cultures are more likely to use female characters in advertisements compared to masculine cultures. In masculine cultures the difference between male and female characters is bigger than in feminine cultures because the gender role division is bigger in masculine cultures. In feminine cultures there is a more equal role division which in turn is reflected in the gender role portrayal in advertisements.
Although previous studies provided evidence for the impacts of cultural norm on the portrayals of women and men in advertising, the scope of previous research was limited to television and magazine advertising. To obtain a complete picture of contemporary gender roles across a variety of media, the line of research has to be extended to other types of media. Given the increasing importance of the web as an advertising media and the confounding effect of media types on cross-cultural variation of advertising content, web advertising is worth being studied (An and Kim, 2007). The web’s unprecedented potential as a global advertising medium has attracted many international advertisers to adopt the web as part of their media mix, helping them easily reach consumers across the globe. Only An and Kim (2007) investigated the gender role portrayal issue with web advertising.
essential element of Hofstede’s masculinity dimension is the preference for masculine or feminine values in a culture. Where masculine cultures strive for material success, achievement and productivity, feminine societies value relationships. Albers-Miller and Gelb (1996) showed that these values are related to advertising themes and appear in magazine and television advertisements. Milner and Collins (2000) reported significant cross-cultural differences in the frequency of characters depicted in relationships with others among the four nations, Sweden, Russia, Japan, and the USA. According to their results, the commercials from the most feminine Sweden featured more characters in relationships than those from other countries, indicating that those commercials produced for consumers in countries at the feminine end of Hofstede’s continuum featured a greater proportion of characters in relationship than those at the masculine end. Therefore, it is expected that advertisements in feminine countries are more likely to depict relationship portrayals for both genders than masculine countries. In addition, productivity or production situation has been employed as another operational definition of Hofstede’s masculine value (Milner and Collins, 2000; Milner, 2005). General expectation is that depictions of characters in production situations exhibited through employment for both sexes will be prominent in masculine countries (An and Kim, 2007).
This leads to the first two hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1. Web advertisements from Dutch websites will depict more characters in relationships with others compared to web advertisements on American websites.
numbers and percentages of female versus and male characters portrayed in advertisements between different countries (Wiles et al., 1995; Milner and Collins, 2000). These studies found that the more feminine a country, the greater is the likelihood of its culture to feature women as a main character in advertisements. For instance, Milner and Collins (2000) reported that the ratio of female characters to commercials was higher for Swedish advertisements than those for Russia and the USA. Similarly, Wiles et al. (1995) found that advertisements from the Netherlands depicted men more often than females and the Swedish advertisements portrayed females more frequently than the Dutch advertisements (An and Kim, 2007).
It has been also shown by Wiles and Tjernlund in 1991 that the frequency and percentage of female characters portrayed in advertisements are moderated by the type of products advertised (An and Kim, 2007). For instance, women tend to appear more often in the advertisements for product groups where women are the major users of like personal care and beauty, clothing, home appliances, personal accessories and cleaning products. On the other hand, men tend to dominate the advertisements for automobiles, alcoholic beverages, financial services, and industrial products. However, in the advertisements for neutral products, such as food, medicine, furniture, entertainment, etc. it is predicted that the advertisements of feminine countries will feature women more frequently than those of masculine countries (An and Kim, 2007).
Hypothesis 3. Web advertisements from Dutch websites will depict more women as a main character compared to web advertisements on American websites when advertising for neutral products.
magazines women were more likely to be placed in a decorative role than in Swedish magazines (Odekerken-Schröder et al., 2002). Odekerken-Schröder et al. found in 2002 that women are shown as sex objects more in masculine countries than in feminine countries by comparing the UK and the Netherlands. Therefore we can expect that when women are not in a production situation or working role, they will be more likely to be depicted in family and recreational roles in the Netherlands (more feminine) and in the USA (more masculine) they will be more likely to be depicted in a decorative role.
METHODOLOGY
This study employed a quantitative content analysis approach to provide a numerically-based summary of different roles portrayed by women and men in web advertisements from the Netherlands and the USA. Content analysis is the single most frequently used analytical method for studies in advertising content (Sin et al. 2002). This is an appropriate method for examining advertising messages and the mode of message presentation.
Like most of the current advertising content studies frequency counts and chi-square tests will be used as data analytical methods (Sin et al., 2002). These methods will provide insight and can tell if the differences found are statistically significant. With the chi-square test the distinction between the test statistic and its distribution can be made. It tests a null hypothesis stating that the frequency distribution of certain events observed in a sample is consistent with a particular theoretical distribution. The events considered must be mutually exclusive and have total probability 1. A common case for this is where the events each cover an outcome of a categorical variable. One sample chi-square tests will be performed on the data for visual central figures (Furnham and Farragher, 2000). Chi-square analysis can be used with nominal data and will be stable with five or more observations per cell (Milner, 2005).
Sample
video links, animated images, etc. which are all important parts of communication messages and function as valuable tools for achieving the desired communication objectives. However, because physical aspects of the entire web site are in many ways different from what is traditionally considered an ad (e.g. magazine or newspaper ad), it is understandable for this type of comparative content analysis, which intends to compare the visual elements of an ad containing human characters, to examine the ads that are similar to typical magazine or newspaper ads (An and Kim, 2007). The first or the main advertisement appearing on the front page of websites became the unit of analysis because the front page of corporate or brand websites acts like a ―front door‖ of the entire website containing the main advertisement or intended primary image (An and Kim, 2007).
Coding
The content of the advertisements will be analyzed by coding the content using a modified coding scheme used in previous studies (An and Kim, 2007). Only the advertisements containing one or more adults as central character(s) were considered in collecting information about gender role portrayals. A character was classified as a central character when the focus of the advertisement was on the body and/or activities of that person. No more than two central characters were selected in each advertisement. Those advertisements depicting children, teenagers and crowd scenes in which it was difficult to determine individual roles were excluded from the analysis. Each central character was coded in terms of four variables. The coding categories that are used are:
1. Gender of the central characters(s): a. Male
b. Female
2. Type of role of the central character(s):
a. Relationship with others (friends, family, lovers, teacher/student or worker) b. Non-relationship role (celebrity, typical user or others)
3. Production situation
a. Working (characters being depicted in occupational settings)
b. Non-working (characters depicted in home or outdoor/recreational settings) 4. Type of non-working role portrayed by women
a. Family roles (with children or other family members in a family environment)
b. Recreational roles (leisure activity such as watching television or jogging) c. Decorative roles (passive and non-functional nature, primarily meant to
In order to produce frequency count of characters by product types, to make a numerically based summary, the product category scheme was borrowed from An and Kim (2007). Considering the confounding effect of product category on the portrayal of human characters and their roles, a total of 19 product categories were broadly grouped into three categories:
1. Female products 2. Male products 3. Neutral products
RESULTS
Hypothesis 1 predicted that characters in advertisements on Dutch websites will be depicted in relationships with others more often than characters in American advertisements. In order to test this hypothesis the differences between the portrayals of women, men and women and men together in relationships will be tested. As shown in table 2, a greater percentage of Dutch advertisements (55,9 %) depicted relationship portrayals for both men and women (total) compared to the USA (47,8 %). This result however was not statistically significant at the 0,05 level because the p value is 0,31 meaning that there is a chance of 69 % that the findings are true. If we only look at the male characters we can see that in the Netherlands 63 % is depicted in relationship with others whereas the percentage of men depicted in relationship with others in the USA is only 46,4 %. However this result is again statistically not significant (p = 0,158). Female characters were depicted in relationships about half the time in both countries (51,2 % in the Netherlands and 50 % in the USA). Since this result is also not statistically significant (p = 0,915) the first hypothesis is not supported.
TABLE 2
Depictions of characters in relationship with others
Dutch advertisements American advertisements
Main characters N Percent n Percent
Women 21/41 51,2 18/36 50,0
Men 17/27 63,0 26/56 46,4
Total 38/68 55,9 44/92 47,8
Notes: women: χ2 = 0,011, df = 1, p = 0,915; men: χ2 = 1,995, df = 1, p = 0,158; total: χ2 = 1,016, df = 1, p = 0,314
Dutch advertisements. More than one third (34,8 %) of the advertisements from the USA showed characters in production situations exhibited through employment whereas only 14,7 % of the Dutch advertisements did so. The difference was significant at the 0,01 level, meaning that the chance that this result is true is over 99 % (chi2 = 8,141, df = 1, p < 0,01). A similar result was found when women were featured as a main character. In this case only 3 out of 41 women were depicted in an employment situation in Dutch advertisements whilst in the USA 10 out of 36 women were depicted so. This difference was significant at the 0,05 level. The between-country difference between men was not statistically significant although the percentage of male characters depicted in an employment situation was higher in the USA sample compared to the Netherlands (39,3 % and 25,9 %). In total there is enough evidence to support the second hypothesis.
TABLE 3
Depictions of characters in employment
Dutch advertisements American advertisements
Main characters N Percent n Percent
Women* 3/41 7,3 10/36 27,8
Men 7/27 25,9 22/56 39,3
Total** 10/68 14,7 32/92 34,8
Notes: *p < 0,05; **p < 0,01; women: χ2 = 5,719, df = 1, p < 0,05; men: χ2 = 1,430, df = 1, p = 0,232; total: χ2 = 8,141, df = 1, p < 0,01
TABLE 4
Gender portrayed by product category
Dutch advertisements American advertisements
Product category Females Males Ratioa Females Males Ratioa
Female products Personal care/beauty 3 2 1,5 2 1 2,0 Clothing 4 0 - 3 1 3,0 Jewelry 0 0 - 0 0 - Accessories 0 0 - 1 0 - Cleaning 2 0 - 3 2 1,5 Home appliances 0 2 0,0 0 0 Subtotalb 9 4 2,3 9 4 2,3 Male products Internet/computer/technology 0 0 - 1 3 0,3 Automobiles 2 2 1,0 0 4 0,0 Insurance/bank/finance/legal service 4 4 1,0 5 4 1,3 Sports 0 0 - 0 1 0,0 Alcoholic beverages 0 0 - 1 4 0,3 Toy/games 0 0 - 0 0 - Subtotalc 6 6 1,0 7 16 0,4 Neutral products Food/snacks/soda 5 2 2,5 5 10 0,5 Travel/leisure 2 0 - 0 0 - Restaurants/retail shops 1 2 0,5 2 3 0,7 Entertainment 1 1 1,0 1 3 0,3 Transportation 0 0 - 0 0 - Medicine 4 2 2,0 9 11 0,8 Others 13 10 1,3 3 9 0,3 Subtotald 26 17 1,5 20 36 0,6 Totale 41 27 1,5 36 56 0,6
Notes: aRatio represents the number of females portrayed compared to the number of males portrayed; b Too little observations for stable analysis, 2 cells (50%) have expected count less than 5; c χ2 = 1,293, df = 1, p = 0,256; d χ2 = 5,990, df = 1, p < 0,05; e χ2 = 7,015, df = 1, p < 0,01
websites will depict more women in decorative roles. However, as displayed in table 5, the results show that more Dutch women were depicted more often in a decorative role than American women (55,3 % vs. 42,3 %). American women turned out to be depicted more often in a family role (46,2 % vs. 31,6 %). It appears that there is no significant relationship between the country origin and the type of non-working role portrayed in the advertisement from the Netherlands and the USA. Therefore hypothesis 4 is not supported.
TABLE 5
Role portrayals of women in a non-working role
Female non-working roles
Dutch advertisements American advertisements
DISCUSSION
As mentioned before most advertisements are built upon shared cultural values because people understand advertisements by relating them to their culture and to the shared values or beliefs held in common by most people (An and Kim, 2007). It is therefore logical to expect that cultural values have significant impact on advertising. To this end, this study compared gender role portrayals in web advertisements between the Netherlands and the USA based on Hofstede’s masculinity dimension which describes the Netherlands as a feminine culture and the USA as a masculine culture. The results show that two hypotheses on the portrayal of production situations exhibited through employment and the frequency of females portrayed as a main character were supported whereas none of the other two hypotheses on the relationship portrayal and the non-working role portrayals of female characters were supported.
association between feminine values and employment portrayals as well as the prediction of such relationships for other cultures.
Second, this study confirmed the association between feminine values and the preference of female characters in advertisements. The results indicate that a greater percentage of Dutch advertisements featured women as a main character, whereas men dominated advertisement from the USA as a main character. The results are similar to the study by An and Kim (2007). They also found that advertisements from the more feminine country (South-Korea) featured more women than men as main character compared to the more masculine country (USA). This evidence is another support for the association between the gender of a central characters in advertisements and the gender of a country, based on Hofstede’s Masculinity index, defined by Milner and Collins (2000).
However, the results cannot provide statistically significant results to support the notion that a country’s gender can be linked to depictions of characters in relationships. Although for both male and female characters there were more characters depicted in relationship with others in the Netherlands compared to the USA, the results are not statistically significant. Previous findings of Milner and Collins (2000) and An and Kim (2007) found similar results that were significant. The results do not contradict these other findings but the association between the gender of nations and the relationship portrayal is under question.
CONCLUSION
Overall, this study shows that the difference in the depiction of women and men in web advertising, particularly those related to the depiction of characters in a production situation and the gender of a main character, can be explained by using Hofstede’s masculinity dimension. Although the association between the gender of nations and the portrayal of characters in relationship is under question, the results confirm the potential of Hofstede’s framework in marketing and advertising research examining the types of gender-related advertising appeals that might be appropriate in a specific culture.
Milner and Collins (2000) upgraded Hofstede’s model to a ―gender of nations‖ concept and concluded that advertising strategists can utilize his framework as a rough guide to provide direction in selecting country-specific advertising appeals (An and Kim, 2007). Advertising strategists, especially those charged with consumer products, can apply the study findings on a practical level by locating a country on Hofstede’s masculinity index when are planning an international advertising campaign. The position on this index can serve as a guideline for creating visual images of main characters in advertisements. In this regard, this study sustains previous recommendation for international advertising that Hofstede’s framework can be used as a useful guide for selection of appropriate advertising appeals across cultures because global standardized advertising appears to be strategically not wise.
There is an undergoing change of women’s role and the changed is diffused into media advertising since the advertisements reflect the values in societies as discussed before. Women in the Netherlands have also experienced a change in the environmental factors surrounding women’s role in society since the Dutch government passed the ―Equal Treatment Act‖ in 1994 and installed the ―Equal Treatment Commission‖ to prevent unequal treatment. An increasing number of Dutch women have been entering the labor market. Between 1980 and 2003 the number of Dutch women on the labor market increased from 30 % to 55 %. The number of women with a part-time job doubled in the period 1990-2003 (Boelens and van der Valk, 2003). While Dutch women are actively engaging in a wide variety of fields and making significant contributions to society, it appears that their attitude towards traditional feminine role orientation have changed along with those of men. It is, thus, possible that advertisers may have wished to develop new strategies to deal with different groups of consumers in different ways when sexually stereotyped images are concerned.
Limitations
Hofstede’s model has been criticized for not being complete and having certain holes and inconsistencies. Objections have been raised about the generalizations about national level culture from an analysis of small sub national populations (An and Kim, 2007). It has not been proven that every country has a uniform national culture and it is also not sure that the data that Hofstede collected was representative for that supposed national uniformity. Some researchers say that the research was biased because there were only Europeans and Americans in the research team whereas the study also involved countries from other parts of the world. In addition it has been criticized for the sample representativeness, the data gathering method and for being outdated because globalization makes the world younger and converging around a common set of values (An an Kim, 2007). However, despite such criticisms, it is arguably the most emperically-based and complete theory of cultural difference to date, and that is why it has been given so much weight in the realm of advertising and marketing research.
advertising appeals between the USA and the Netherlands, which have been found in television and magazine advertisements, might have been outweighed or weakened by the common strategy pursued by global advertisers to minimize variations in advertisements. Also, web advertisements might have been created to target selective groups that seek information about a brand or product on the internet. This might have resulted in a failure to reflect the average value priority system of the two countries, as related to masculinity in web advertising. This limitation should be considered when interpreting the results.
Directions for future research
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