Measuring Gaze: Women’s Visual Processing of Empowerment and Objectification Messages in Empowerment-Themed Advertisements

Abstract

Empowerment-themed advertisements (ETAs) often pair ostensibly empowering narratives with objectification imagery. Existing research demonstrates that women do not report feeling empowered after viewing ETAs but cannot confirm why. In this study, 186 female participants were randomly assigned to view captions and/or photos from ETAs while their eye movements were recorded. The empowerment-themed captions increased women’s felt empowerment when presented alone but failed to empower when paired with photos. However, captioning photos with empowerment-themed text did lead to lower self-objectification than captioning them with objectification-themed text. Thus, while the visuals used in ETAs limit their effectiveness, self-objectification may not be responsible.