July’s been quite the month for gender in the news.  From Jodie Whittaker’s casting as Doctor Who, to trains so simple even women can drive them, to how much the Beeb pays its female talent, gender issues have dominated.  You might think it was quite the time for the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to launch our own contribution to the debate, Depictions, Perceptions and Harm: a report on gender stereotypes in advertising, the result of over a year’s careful scrutiny of the evidence-base.

Our report makes the case that, while most ads (and the businesses that run them) are getting it right when it comes to gender stereotypes in advertising, the evidence suggests that some could do with reigning it in a little.  Specifically, it argues that some ads can contribute to real world harms in the way they portray gender roles and characteristics.

Now we’re not talking here about ads that show a woman doing the cleaning or a man the DIY.  It would be most odd if advertisers couldn’t depict a woman doing the family shop or a man mowing the lawn.  Ads cannot be divorced from reality.  What we’re talking about is ads that go significantly further by, for example, suggesting through their content and context that it’s a mum’s sole duty to tidy up after her family, who’ve just trashed the house.  Or that an activity or career is inappropriate for a girl because it’s the preserve of men.  Or that boys are not ‘proper’ boys if they’re not strong and stoical.  Or that men are hopeless at simple parental or household tasks because they’re, well… men.

Advertising is only a small contributor to gender stereotyping, but a contributor it is.  And there’s ever greater recognition of the real harms that can result from gender stereotyping.  Put simply, gender stereotypes can lead us to have a narrower sense of ourselves – how we can behave, who we can be, the opportunities we can take, the decisions we can make.  And they can lead other people to have a narrower sense of us too.  That can affect individuals, whatever their gender.  It can affect the economy: we have a shortage of engineers in this country, in part, says the UK’s national academy for engineering, because many women don’t see it as a career for them.  And it can affect our society as a whole.

Many businesses get this already.  A few weeks ago, UN Women and Unilever announced the global launch of Unstereotype Alliance, with some of the world’s biggest companies, including Proctor & Gamble, Mars, Diageo, Facebook and Google, signing up.  Agencies like JWT and UM have very recently published their own research, further shining the spotlight on gender stereotyping in advertising.  We see our UK work as a complement to an increasingly global response to the issue.  And we’re doing it with broad support from the UK advertising industry: the Committees of Advertising Practice – the industry bodies which author the UK Advertising Codes that we administer – have been very closely involved in our work and will now flesh out the standards we need to help advertisers stay the right side of the line.

Needless to say, our report has attracted a fair amount of comment. And commentators have made some interesting and important arguments.  Take my ‘ads cannot be divorced from reality’ point above.  Clearly we – the UK advertising regulator - must take into account the way things are, but what should we do if, for example, an ad is reflecting a part of society as it is now, but that part is not fair and equal?  The ad might simply be mirroring the way things are, but at a time when many people in our society, including through public policy and equality laws, are trying to mould it into something different.  If we reign in the more extreme examples, are we being social engineers?  Or are we simply taking a small step in redressing the imbalance in a society where the drip, drip, drip of gender stereotyping over many years has, itself, been social engineering.  And social engineering which, ironically, has left us with too few engineers.

The media coverage our report attracted gave news outlets a chance to run plenty of well- known ads from yesteryear.  Fairy Liquid, Shake n Vac and some real “even a woman can open it”-type horrors from decades ago.  For some, that was an opportunity to make the point that ads really were sexist back then, but everything’s fine on the gender stereotyping front today.  Now I’m sorry, but that argument shows a real lack of imagination.  History has not stopped.  If we’re looking back at ads of 50 years ago and marvelling at how we thought they were OK back then, despite knowing they were products of their time, won’t our children and grandchildren be doing exactly the same thing in 50 years’ time?  What ‘norms’ now will make tomorrow’s society’s flesh crawl?  We think the evidence points to some portrayals of gender roles and characteristics being precisely one such ‘norm’, excused by some today on the basis that that’s just the way it is.

So, our report signals change is coming.  CAP will now work on the standards so we can pin down the rules or guidance that help businesses stay the right side of the line.  We don’t want to catch advertisers out, so we and CAP will work hard to provide as much advice and training as we can, so they can get their ads right in the first place.  And from next year, we at the ASA will make sure those standards are followed, taking care that our regulation is balanced and wholly respectful of the public’s desire to continue to see creative ads that are relevant, entertaining and informative.  You won’t see a sea-change in the ads that appear, but we hope to smooth some of the rougher edges.  This is a small but important step in making sure modern society is better represented in ads.


*First published on newstatesman.com on Thursday 27th July 2017.

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Guy became Chief Executive of the ASA, the UK regulator of ads in all media, in 2009.  Responsible for executing the ASA’s strategy to make UK ads responsible, he oversees all functions of the ASA system. Read more