Gender Role and Social Power in African and North American Advertisements

In developing advertisements, advertisers must be cognizant of cultural conventions. Among the most basic cultural conventions are the roles that are considered suitable for each gender (Maynard and Taylor, 1999; Wiles, Wiles and Tjernlund, 1995). Many studies have been conducted in North America that investigated gender roles (i.e., the occupations, settings and product categories associated with each gender) in both television commercials and magazine advertisements (e.g., Bretl and Cantor, 1988; Courtney and Lockeretz, 1971; Courtney and Whipple, 1983; Dilevko and Harris, 1997; McArthur and Resko, 1975). In addition, there have been a number of cross-cultural studies that looked at gender roles in advertising, but the entire continent of Africa has been overlooked with one exception (Mwangi, 1996). The need to understand the depiction of the genders in African advertising is great as the emerging economies of Africa continue to grow in importance to world trade.