Learning Materials Women in the Media
The media is selling young people the idea that girls’ and women’s value lies in their youth, beauty, and sexuality and not in their capacity as leaders. Boys learn that their success is tied to dominance, power, and aggression. Encouraging media to value people as whole human beings, not gendered stereotypes.
READ: Aulette textbook chapters 6 & 7
View:
1.
Women Representing Women
(Links to an external site.)
2.
Media PPT 2021
(attached)
1. Super Heroes
(Links to an external site.)
1.
Toys
(Links to an external site.)
1.
What the media teaches children
(Links to an external site.)
1.
Power in anger
(Links to an external site.)
1. The Bechdel Test
(Links to an external site.)
Journal 1- Gender and advertising:
Your assignment is to write a reflective journal style essay. In this essay you need to write a minimum of 800 words following elementary English grammar, punctuation and organization style you should be comfortable with in the university. The journal style is unique in that you take what we have been reading/discussing and you relate the material to person life experience. The goal is to enhance learning through reflection. The concepts that we are discussing in the course are ones that we readily see in our daily life and can be very personal. There is no right or wrong answers that you can writing in your journal. I am looking to see if you understood the basic issues we are addressing and that you are able to relate the issue to your own experience.
If you have completed the assigned journal entry in a sincere manner, you will receive full credit for the assignment. That credit will be lessened only if your entries are unacceptably brief or intentionally do not address the topic. The journal rewards effort and participation. It provides an opportunity to succeed no matter where you are starting from if you sincerely dedicate yourself.
Journal entries are used as tools for student reflection. By consciously thinking about and comparing issues, life experiences, and course readings, students are better able to understand links between theory and practice and to generate justifiable, well-supported opinions. This kind of writing assignment is meant to be interactive, as students engage with ideas and experiences that bring about questions, comparisons, insights, criticisms, speculations, and tentative conclusions.
For today’s assignment please discuss what was significant about the material that we are covering in class related to how women are portrayed in the media, movies, advertising, newspaper articles, etc.
Journal 2-pay equity:
Your assignment is to write a reflective journal style essay. In this essay you need to write a minimum of 800 words following elementary English grammar, punctuation and organization style you should be comfortable with in the university. The journal style is unique in that you take what we have been reading/discussing and you relate the material to person life experience. The goal is to enhance learning through reflection. The concepts that we are discussing in the course are ones that we readily see in our daily life and can be very personal. There is no right or wrong answers that you can writing in your journal. I am looking to see if you understood the basic issues we are addressing and that you are able to relate the issue to your own experience.
If you have completed the assigned journal entry in a sincere manner, you will receive full credit for the assignment. That credit will be lessened only if your entries are unacceptably brief or intentionally do not address the topic. The journal rewards effort and participation. It provides an opportunity to succeed no matter where you are starting from if you sincerely dedicate yourself.
Journal entries are used as tools for student reflection. By consciously thinking about and comparing issues, life experiences, and course readings, students are better able to understand links between theory and practice and to generate justifiable, well-supported opinions. This kind of writing assignment is meant to be interactive, as students engage with ideas and experiences that bring about questions, comparisons, insights, criticisms, speculations, and tentative conclusions.
For today’s assignment please discuss what was significant about the materials we are discussing related to women in the workplace and issues of Pay Equity. For example, should everyone doing an equivalent type of job be paid the same amount of money? There are laws in the US that require equal pay for equal work, but on average women in the US are paid 20% less than men. Over the course of a lifetime this low pay as a very large consequence.
Gender Issues in
Media & The Environment
Objectives
Understand media as a source of gender stereotypes
News
TV
Advertising
Blogs for Gamers
News Media
News give us a picture where men outnumber women in nearly all occupational categories
Except two: students and homemakers
https://www.ted.com/talks/megan_kamerick_women_should_represent_women_in_media 10 minutes
Wired- almost never puts a woman on the cover
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, defended his choice and said there aren’t enough women, prominent women in technology to sell a cover, to sell an issue.
2003 Diamonds 2011 – Rosie
2020 Media report
One in five experts interviewed by media are women.
Women are frequently portrayed in stereotypical and hyper-sexualised roles in advertising and the film industry, which has long-term social consequences.
And 73% of the management jobs are occupied by men compared to 27% occupied by women.
The crucial role of media in achieving gender equality
21 Feb. 2020
Women only make up 24% of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news.
46% of news stories reinforce gender stereotypes
4% of stories clearly challenge gender stereotypes.
The majority of female media workers experience gender specific harassment both inside their organizations, outside of them, and more increasingly online.
2021 Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
Statistically, there has been little forward movement for girls in media in six decades.
For nearly 60 years, gender inequality on screen has remained largely unchanged and unchecked. Without an educational voice and force for change, this level of imbalance is likely to stay the same or worsen.
Only through education, research, and advocacy both from within the studio system and entertainment industry, and with parents and kids, can we effect real change in this heavily gender-biased media landscape.
Even among the top-grossing G-rated family films, girl characters are out numbered by boys three-to-one.
Female characters continue to show dramatically more skin than their male counterparts, and feature extremely tiny waists and other exaggerated body characteristics.
This hypersexualization and objectification of female characters leads to unrealistic body ideals in very young children, cementing and often reinforcing negative body images and perceptions during the formative years.
Research shows that lookism still pervades cinematic content in very meaningful ways.
Females behind the camera fall far behind their male contemporaries and are at a distinct disadvantage in the entertainment industry.
Only 7% of directors, 13% of writers, and 20% of producers are female. With such a dearth of female representation in front of and behind the camera, it’s a struggle to champion female stories and voices.
The Institute’s research proves that female involvement in the creative process is imperative for creating greater gender balance before production even begins. There is a causal relationship between positive female portrayals and female content creators involved in production. In fact, when even one woman writer works on a film, there is a 10.4% difference in screen time for female characters.
Men outnumber women in key production roles by nearly 5 to 1.
The media
Selling the idea that girls’ and women’s value lies in their
youth,
beauty,
sexuality
not in their capacity as leaders
http://therepresentationproject.org/film/miss-representation/the-issue/#sthash.G9glc0NM.dpuf
Boys learn that their success is tied to
dominance,
power, and
aggression
We must value people as whole human beings, not gendered stereotypes
Public pedagogy. That is, it is how societies are taught ideologies. It’s how you learned what it meant to be a man or a woman, what it meant to behave yourself in public, what it meant to be a patriot and have good manners.
It’s all the constituent social relations that make us up as a people. It’s, in short, how we learn what we know about other people and about the world. But we live in a 100-percent media-saturated society.
What that means is that every single aspect of your human existence outside of your basic bodily functions is in some way touched by media.
Bechdel Test
The Bechdel Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule is a simple test which names the following three criteria:
3 minute video
Gender & Race Roles in TV Advertising
Powerful White Men- 2x as likely to give orders or exercise authority
White Women as Sex objects – 25% of women depicted as sex objects, flirting, or low calorie cereal, cleaning products
Aggressive Black Men 3x more likely than white men to be shown playing rough
Inconsequential Black Women less authority than white males, less engaged in family roles and less sexual
Also true for Latino, Asian American, American Indians
Gender stereotypes banned in UK 2019
https://www.xprize.org/articles/the-evolution-of-gender-bias-in-advertising
Gaming Industry
Female Roles- Damsels in distress or ultimate warrior-
2017- Hypersexualized 80 percent of female characters in video game magazines are portrayed as sexualized, scantily clad or a vision of beauty
2014- James Therien, technical director at European gamemaker Ubisoft, told trade publication
VideoGamer that the latest instalment of Ubisoft hit Assassin’s Creed would not feature any playable female characters because it would have “doubled the work“
Average gamer is 31 years old
71% of gamers are 18 or older
48% of gamers are female
Males often will not play female rolls
Females often play male rolls- have male screen names
Percentage of female characters in video games has remained steady at around 15%
9% of the titles “exclusively playable female protagonists,”
32%, had “exclusively playable male protagonists.“
2018 was a great year for gaming, and many defining new titles were released.
Among the various critically-acclaimed games of 2018, there were games that featured some tough female characters. In many games released this year, such as Assassins Creed Odyssey and Far Cry 5, players even had the option to play as either a male or a female character.
https://gamerant.com/best-video-game-character-2018-female/
Gaming Is Now Equally Distributed Between Males and Females, But the Supply Side Still Needs To Catch Up 2020
Sports games such as Madden and NBA2K have a particular opportunity for growth within the female segment:
52% of American football viewers in the US are female, as found by MIDiA’s Q4 2019 survey. Yet, only 30% of Madden NFL (the flagship American football game) fans are female.
44% of US basketball viewers are female. But only 36% of NBA2K players are female.
With games such as GTA (45% female) Call of Duty (45% female), Fortnite (45% female), and Halo (49% female), there is absolutely no reason why sports games should be skewing male in terms of gender distribution.
“Ecofeminism is an activist and academic movement that sees critical connections between the domination of nature and the exploitation of women….
Ecofeminist activism grew during the 1980s and 1990s among women from the anti-nuclear, environmental, and lesbian-feminist movements
Mother Earth
Women as protectors of the planet- free from pesticides
Rachel Carson
https://az.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/envh10.sci.life.eco.silentspring/rachel-carsons-silent-spring/#.WnjMA6inFPY
