Women are showing up in the oddest places these days. They are fast approaching half the work force. Although women are enacting many new occupational roles, reasons being advanced for these changes vary from the economy to the women's movement. Nor surprisingly, women have been increasingly arrested in the sixties and seventies, they are also reporting being victimized by crime more. Likewise, a n increasing number of women are becoming law enforcers. Examination of the depiction of women in these crime-related roles by the mass media will add to the current level of understanding about mass media's portrayal of women.Television commercials do not differ significantly from television entertainment in their treatment of women. Dominick and Rauch (1972) found that three-fourths of all commercials in which women were featured were those advertising bathroom and kitchen products. They also reported that 94 percent of all authoritative "voice-overs" in commercials featured male rather than female voices. Similarly, Phillips (1978) noted that the housewife receives the most attention by magazines like Family Circle. Lang (1978) in studying lists of the most admired women found that those women selected were typically related to a famous male. Thus, the research on women's portrayal by the mass media seems to indicate that women are usually confined to roles which are subordinate to or at least related to a male.Mass media researchers have also consistently found that men outnumber women on television and in newspaper coverage, For example, Sternglanz and Serbin (1974), in their study of children's television programs, report that two-thirds of all roles on television are enacted by men. Similarly, Gerbner and Signorielli's ten-year study of prime-time television (1979) suggests that men on television may outnumber women by three to one. Moreover Cantor (1978) found that women appear only about 15 percent of the time in public television. The only type of television program differing from this numerical predominance of males, according to Downing (1974), is the daytime serial or soap opera, where women and men appear in about equal numbers. Similarly, Molotch (1978) has noted that females covered in news accounts remain a minority of all persons achieving the newspaper's attention.Not only are there fewer women than men and a selected number of occupational roles enacted by women in the media, women on television and in the newspapers are often depicted as behaving in a stereotypcal female fashion. For example, Gerbner and Signorielli (1979) maintain that while women on television are usually i n their twenties, males are most likely to be between 35-44. Moreover, they found in comparing the number of people portrayed as committing violence to those depicted as victims of 151
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.