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Abstract

This study bridges a critical gap in scholarship on “femvertising”—advertising aimed at women that promotes women’s empowerment—by shifting the focus from the Global North to South Asia’s under-researched media landscape. Using an explanatory sequential mixed-method design, the quantitative phase of the research analyzed 145 femvertising advertisements from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other international campaigns using chi-square tests to examine associations between gender portrayals and three empowerment types: woman-to-woman (solidarity among women), man-to-woman (patriarchal negotiation), and woman-to-self (self-determination). The qualitative phase employed semi-structured interviews with twenty women consumers to explore how they interpret, experience, and respond to these empowerment narratives. Findings reveal significant cross-cultural variations. Pakistan exhibits the highest gender stratification, India occupies a middle position, and Bangladesh shows less stratification than its neighbors but more than international campaigns. Qualitative themes, such as the empowered self, negotiating patriarchy, and sisterhood as solidarity, help to illuminate why these statistical patterns emerge: women’s reception of empowerment narratives is mediated by local cultural norms, family dynamics, and structural constraints. In this study, I challenge universalist assumptions in feminist media studies and demonstrate that effective femvertising is culturally contingent.

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