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How education can help achieve gender equality in the creative department

How education can help achieve gender equality in the creative department. Dr. Alejandra Hernández University of Alicante. Rationale.

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How education can help achieve gender equality in the creative department

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  1. How education can help achieve gender equality in the creative department Dr. Alejandra Hernández Universityof Alicante

  2. Rationale • A research project on the situation of women in the Spanish Advertising Enterprises shows that there is still an occupational sex segregation (Martín-Llaguno et al., 2007). • There is an extremely low percentage of women in the managerial positions (1% women vs. 10% men). So in this sector we can confirm the presence of the “glass ceiling” (Wirth, 2001). • The horizontal segregation in this industry refers to the concentration of women in the account services, administration tasks and public relations departments. In a similar vein, men are predominantly concentrated in the creative tasks.

  3. Rationale • In Spain the adoption of the Law 3/2007, 22 March on effective equality between women and men follows to achieve the equal promotion of men and women in the different professional groups and categories. • In the commercial communication industry, the adoption of this measure would be strongly recommended in the creative departments to remove the sexist advertising. • To achieve a fair and not stereotyped image of women in the mass media, the efforts have been concentrated on promoting the participation of women in the control of the message once created, (“censor force”), but not on their participation in its conception. • In this research we consider that the gender inequality in the core of the advertising industry (the creative department) would be able to perpetuate the sexist advertising in the mass media.

  4. Rationale • In the EEES context, the Spanish Green Paper on Communication Studies shows that ethics issues are an integral part of the education of advertising professionals (Aneca, 2004). • In this sense is needed to spread a new paradigm in the women’s advertising. “that emphasizes values which women hold to be important, and to discard certain practices, such as stereotyping women as weak, in need of help, or sex objects”Cohan (2001: 323) • One of the recommendations proposed to be taken is “to encourage creative teams to transform negative images to ones which empower women” (Cohan, 2001: 331).

  5. Goals of the study • To know the department the future advertising workforce plan to go into. • To detect the need of adopting a measure of corporate social responsibility: a balanced distribution of women and men in the different professional groups.

  6. Participants • 350 advertising undergraduate students from three Spanish universities (86 males, 264 females). • Age: 17 to 30 years (M = 20.45; SD = 2.58). • One hundred eighty-two (52%) were “full-time” students, 131 (34.4%) had part-time jobs and 37 had temporary jobs (13.6%). • Among the respondents, 162 (46.3%) were involved in a relationship and 188 (53.7%) were not either married or involved in a relationship.

  7. Procedure • The data were collected as a part of a larger study on family and work expectations of advertising undergraduate students. • We design a questionnaire which was administered in 2006-2007 academic year in class, prior to lesson commencement.

  8. Measures • Gender: this variable was coded as 1= man and 2= woman. • Advertising Department: participants reported which specialization they plan to go into (production, account services, research, creative, copy, art, public relations, administration, other).

  9. Results CREATIVITY (P= .01) WOMEN: 20.1% MEN: 40.7% Creativity RESEARCH (P= .01) WOMEN: 5.7% MEN: 1.2% Public Relations Art Production Research Other Account Services Copy writing Administration I do not know A chi-square test indicates that there are significant male-female differences in the choice of advertising specialization χ² (9,N= 350)= 20.81, p= .01.

  10. Discussion • In the core of the advertising sector (the creative department), the male viewpoint will still dominate the advertising campaigns. • We can argue two possible explanations for these gender inequalities. • 1. The advertising education could reproduce the gender stereotypes. • 2. The gender differences in the advertising department could be attributed to the different skills of women and men. • The results of this study beg the question of whether the parity in the creative teams could aide to develop a gender-balanced society.

  11. Discussion • In sum, with this paper we propose to transform the role of women as “censor force” into “creative force”. • Furthermore, the University can contribute to the social change and deconstruct the gender stereotypes with the adoption of the gender issues in the curricula beyond the gender mainstreaming.

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