Gender Representation and Gender Beliefs in Advertising

Abstract

Advertising plays a central role in reflecting and shaping culturally shared beliefs about gender, yet systematic evidence on how gender is represented, and whether representation aligns with consumers’ actual or perceived gender, remains limited. Using the full history of 2.1M TV ads aired in the U.S. between 2010 and 2020, we provide the first large-scale descriptive analysis of gender representation in advertising. We complement gender presence with a scalable, belief-based measure of the gender-typed advertising context, defined as the extent to which activities, objects, and product cues displayed in an ad are culturally associated with men or women. We document four robust stylized facts concerning gender presence, gender-typed advertising context, asymmetric gender-typing across men and women, and systematic variation across product groups and industries. Linking advertising content to data on consumers’ gender and beliefs about gendered product usage, we show that gender-typed advertising contexts align more closely with beliefs about consumers’ gender (which are often inaccurate) than with their actual gender. We further document substantial heterogeneity across brands that cannot be explained by consumers’ actual gender, including systematic differences by founder gender. Together, these findings show that understanding gender representation in advertising requires distinguishing between gender presence and gender-typed contexts, and recognizing the central role of shared beliefs relative to observed consumer behavior.