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Abstract

Women have been represented by stereotypes and gender roles in the advertising industry for years. A new era of strong women representations has begun with female empowerment activities in advertising. Female empowerment in advertising is called femvertising. Femvertising activities aim to destroy stereotypes in advertisements, ignore sexuality, give pro-female messages, and represent women in an authentic way. The purpose of the study is to investigate women’s representations in television advertising by analyzing stereotypes and female empowerment in Turkey. For this purpose, television advertisements, broadcasting on Turkish television channels between September 2020 and November 2020, were examined by content analysis. In Turkey, television ratings and shares were lower in Summer 2020, and started to rise after September 2020. Due to the increase in ratings and shares in Fall 2020, the television advertisements broadcasted in September, October, and November 2020 were included in the research to understand women representations in Turkish television advertising.

A total of 189 television advertisements were analyzed after eliminating all repeated advertisements during this period. A coding schema was formed to examine the advertisements, and the criteria from previous studies such as gender, narrator, age, roles, characters, and empowerment activities were used in the coding schema. Findings revealed that women continue to be represented by stereotypes and shown in passive roles such as parenting and housekeeping. Female empowerment activities were used in only 28 of 189 advertisements. The research contributes to the literature of women’s studies in terms of showing the latest findings related to women representations in broadcast advertising.

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