Comparing Gender Role Portrayals in American and Korean Advertisements: Update

( Advertisements for a Brazilian Art School found while trying to find a high definition copy of this quintessential Korean cosmetic surgery advertisement; this Korean blogger (understandably) missed the double entendre! )

Turns out that I put my foot in my mouth a bit at the end of the earlier post: after lamenting the lack of studies on gender role portrayals in Korean advertisements and commercials, and especially those with cross national comparisons, then naturally it turned out that a simple google search of “Korean Advertising” revealed the following:

Eun, Ki-Soo. and Kim, Eun-Young “The Transformation of Gender Roles within the Families in Korean Television Commercials from 1985 to 2005″, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Aug 10, 2006.

Nam, Kyoungtae., Lee, Guiohk. and Hwang, Jang-Sun“Gender Role Stereotypes Depicted by Western and Korean Advertising Models in Korean Adolescent Girls’ Magazines“, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, San Francisco, CA, May 23, 2007.

Oh, Hyun Sook. and Frith, Katherine “International Women’s Magazines and Transnational Advertising in South Korea”, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, Jun 16, 2006.

(All links are to their PDF files).

The English in the first reads a little awkwardly, and it suffers from lacking the images referred to in the text too, but I’ll take what material I can get for changes in gender roles in advertising after the so-called “IMF crisis”. In brief, it appears to say that Korean advertisers were strangely unmoved by government and business exhortations for Korean women to nobly acquiesce in their mass lay-offs and then reaffirm their return to the home by supporting their hardworking husbands or fathers, and instead continued trends begun earlier in the 1990s of showing men doing more housework. Moreover, such advertisements rapidly became more common thereafter, reflecting the fact that more and more husbands had to do some housework considering that their wives were increasingly forced to work for the family to get by. A rare positive development then, ironic given the generally irregular, low-paid and insecure work that has comprised the bulk of women’s (and men’s) jobs in the post-IMF era, and which produces an atmosphere that makes it difficult for them to confront the still pervasive sexism in the workplace (I will discuss the resulting “lost decade” of Korean feminism in a later post).

Meanwhile, the quality and depth of the latter two papers are excellent. First, Oh and Sook’s breakdown of the Korean women’s magazine market and then discussion of the practical economic imperatives behind their choices of advertisements, prices and content so forth make it essential reading on the topic hereafter, the latter in particular building on my point about the nuts and bolts of globalization that I mentioned in that earlier post. Then there is Nam et. al.’s paper, which begins thus:

Browsing a Korean fashion magazine targeting adolescent girls, one notices the abundance of Western models in advertising. One again notices that the portrayal of Western models is somewhat different from that of Korean models. This is where our research question begins.

And then on the next page:

Examining gender stereotypical images in advertising using content analysis is a relatively well researched area….However, the current study is different from any other studies in incorporating race as a main factor of the inquiry. Even though race was a main concern in some studies…it has never been a serious factor in studies involving Asian countries, indicating the unspoken assumption that every race in advertising would have been portrayed similarly in those countries. This assumption was unquestioned in studies in gender role stereotypes in Korean advertising as well….That is, those studies reported gender role stereotypes in Korean advertising as a whole, not distinguishing races. As indicated in the beginning sentence, Western, especially Caucasian, models are common in Korean magazine advertising. This observation hints that reporting gender stereotypes without racial distinction in Korea (and probably in other regions of Asia) might be an inaccurate indicator of gender status. In many Asian countries where the white population is essentially non-existent, a comparison of gender role portrayal by Western models and native models seems overdue.

(My emphasis)

Having come to precisely the same conclusion myself two days ago, then naturally reading that has left me feeling pretty pleased with myself. I’ll spare you the self-congratulation for now though, confining my frivolity to posting the following photo (the use of the pink is a great touch):

(Source: David Smeaton, whom I should have mentioned when I posted a link to his photoblog in my blogroll months ago. I highly recommend paying a visit, as not only is his work of excellent quality, it’s also very rare to find a Seoul-based professional photographer with his own blog)

My original intention when I found these papers was to analyze and discuss them after concentrating solely on and finishing this series of posts, for I do have a terrible record for beginning series on big ideas, realizing after further study that the subjects are much bigger than anticipated, putting off the extra work required, and then by accident or design getting distracted by something else instead (sorry). But, spurred as I was by Roger’s comment, it would be a shame to prematurely end this particular little epiphany too, so I will analyze those papers above first, and plan to present my conclusions by the end of the week.

I do have at least one more post to go up between now and then, so with this post I thought that I’d just let readers know my plans and provide links so that anybody interested could download and read the papers for themselves first. Enjoy!

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