//WOMEN 2000- GENDER EQUALITY//: MEDIA-LATAM: Less Stereotypes, but Low Visibility for Women

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 2 2000 (IPS) - While advertising in Latin America is turning less and less to the stereotyped image of the “happy housewife,” women’s bodies continue to sell everything from cars to perfume, and few female experts are interviewed on news programmes.

“There have been great advances in how the image of women is dealt with in advertising,” Gloria Bonder, president of the panel that has awarded the ‘Non-Sexist Advertising Prize’ for the past three years at the Ibero-American Advertising Festival in Buenos Aires, told IPS.

The prize was introduced by the Centre of Studies for Women, headed by Bonder, under the auspices of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, (UNIFEM).

“In commercials, you don’t see so much anymore the housewife or devoted mother,” she pointed out. “There is greater sensitivity towards gender issues in the advertising industry, and our prize is starting to be valued by them, even though the female body is still heavily used as a lure, to sell.”

Bonder, the director of post-graduate gender studies at the public University of Buenos Aires, sees the possibility of ethical regulations on issues of gender advertising. But she prefers the idea of a dialogue with the advertising industry, to raise awareness on the issues involved, instead of approaching the industry “like inspectors.”

Not only advertisements use young, beautiful women to sell, but a wide range of TV programmes as well. In the news, meanwhile, women’s problems and issues are sidelined, while male interviewees far outnumber females.

A study carried out by the Group of Female Communicators of the South – comprised of women’s groups from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay – found that “gender questions and women as protagonists continue occupying a place on the sidelines in the agenda of the media.”

A month-long monitoring of print and broadcasting media in the five South American countries found that when women did appear, it tended to be in relation to a preconceived, traditional “feminine” image associated with feelings, public service, the role of mother, or beauty, and very rarely in relation to questions involving politics, the economy or sports.

The report came five years after the adoption of the Beijing platform of action at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women held in the capital of China.

A five-day Special Session of the UN General Assembly – “Beijing-Plus-Five” – begins Jun 5 in New York to assess the progress made in improving women’s lives in the past five years, including the way women are portrayed in the media.

In Latin America, activists and others agree that there is still much to be done.

“In the media, the presence of women remains scant, and in many cases discriminatory,” Lilian Celiberti, with the Uruguayan women’s group ‘Cotidiano Mujer’, told IPS. “But in the past few years, public opinion has been developing a critical eye with respect to some gender issues, like domestic violence.”

Celiberti underlined, for example, novel approaches to gender issues by radio programmes in Uruguay.

But the monitoring of leading TV and radio news programmes by the Group of Women Communicators from the South found that just 6.8 percent of those interviewed in Uruguay in the month of June 1999 were women.

In Argentina, the proportion was higher – 29 percent. But in Paraguay and Chile, not a single woman was interviewed that month by the most popular radio programmes.

Although the percentages were higher on TV, women in the news were generally anonymous representatives of groups like homemakers, volunteers, teachers or pensioners, rather than experts sought out for their opinions on key issues.

In Paraguay, for example, only 17 of the 134 interviews conducted by the leading TV newscast in June 1999 involved women. And of that total, just three were public figures: a senator, a deputy minister and a judge.

The “visibility” of women does not appear to be related to the number of women working in the media. Female journalists have increasingly been incorporated onto the editorial staff in the print media, and as hosts, commentators or producers of radio and TV programmes.

With respect to the new technologies, Celiberti, the editor of the international women’s magazine ‘Lolapress’, said they did not necessarily bring about changes in the stereotyped image of women.

“The relations of domination existing in society cannot be eliminated with technological advances,” she said. “A culture of exclusion, subordination or violence will also be expressed on the Internet.”

The number of women surfers on the net remains lower in the region than the number of male subscribers, although the projections indicate that it is a fast-growing sector.

However, female surfers tend to visit sites covering the traditional “women’s” issues: fashion, beauty, horoscopes, relationship problems crop up over and over in on-line magazines for women, as they do in many women’s supplements in the print media.

Nevertheless, activists point to the important role played by the internet in connecting women’s groups throughout the world, enabling them to share experiences and establish contacts.

Progress has been made in Latin America towards the Beijing goal of changing the negative, often degrading images of women in the media, although activists point out that five years is a short time span for measuring the still slow and at times imperceptible advances that have begun to be seen.