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The purpose of this paper is to explore reasons why there are so few women in creative departments of advertising agencies and to discuss what impact that might have on the work environment of those creative departments and advertising messages they create.

Provides a review of published research and plus opinions of professionals who cover the advertising industry or work in agency creative departments. Personal observations from the authors' time working in the advertising industry are also included.

Themes gleaned from the literature look at the gender gap, the creative department of advertising agencies as an “old‐boys network,” reasons why women leave creative jobs, and why advertising targeting women as consumers is so bad.

Women opt out of advertising agencies for any number of reasons – more than just having babies. Keeping women's voices in creative departments would give a better balance to the messages agencies create.

Changing creative departments to be more accommodating and flexible to women's needs might not only make them better for women, but also better for men and for families. In addition, the messages from those creative departments may be more compelling to consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to understand advertising practitioners’ theories on how to communicate effectively with men and women via advertising. Further, comparisons are made between practitioners’ theories and academic research.

Qualitative interviews were conducted with 39 US advertising practitioners.

Many professionals believed women preferred other-oriented messages, while men preferred self-oriented messages. They believed women were comprehensive processors, while men were less engaged with advertising messages. They believe men preferred slapstick humor and factual messages, while women preferred emotional appeals.

Comparisons between practitioners’ perspectives and the academic research reveal that practitioners’ theories often correspond to academic theories and empirical data. Relationships with the selectivity hypothesis are explored in depth. Suggestions are made to extend existing theory to test practitioners’ theories.

This study helps to bridge the academician-practitioner gap, which helps academics understand practitioners, communicate with them and develop shared knowledge.

This study fills a research gap in understanding practitioners’ theories of how to communicate with men and women. A key contribution of the research is a comparison of practitioner theories with academic research to note points of agreement and disagreement, bridge the gap and offer suggestions for future research.

To date, the cultural and societal effects of controversial advertising have been insufficiently considered. This study aims to investigate how advertising that uses violent representations of women transgresses the taboo of gender-based violence.

This study encompasses a visual analysis of the subject positions of women in five violent advertising representations and a critical discourse analysis of the defensive statements provided by the client organisations subsequent to the public outrage generated by the campaigns.

The authors identify taboo transgression in the Tease, Piece of Meat and Conquered subject positions, wherein women are represented as suggestive, dehumanised and submissive. Client organisations seek to defend these taboo transgressions through the use of three discursive strategies – subverting interpretations, making authority claims and denying responsibility – which legitimise the control of the organisations but simultaneously work to obscure the power relations at play.

The representational authority that advertisers hold as cultural intermediaries in society highlights the need for greater consideration of the ethical responsibilities in producing controversial advertisements, especially those which undermine the status of women.

Controversial advertising that transgresses the taboo of violence against women reinforces gender norms and promotes ambiguous and adverse understandings of women’s subjectivities by introducing pollution and disorder to gender politics.

This paper critically assesses the societal implications of controversial advertising practices, thus moving away from the extant focus on managerial implications. Through a conceptualisation of controversial advertising as transgressing taboo boundaries, the authors highlight how advertising plays an important role in shifting these boundaries whereby taboos come to be understood as generative and evolving. However, this carries moral implications which may have damaging societal effects.

This paper aims to investigate cross-gender effects of gender stereotypes in advertising. More specifically, it proposes that the negative effects found in studies of women’s reactions to stereotyped female portrayals should hold across gender portrayal and target audience gender.

In two experimental studies, the effects of stereotyped portrayals (vs non-stereotyped portrayals) across gender are compared.

The results show that advertising portrayals of women and men have a presumed negative influence on others, leading to higher levels of ad reactance, which has a negative impact on brand-related effects across model and participant gender, and for gender stereotypes in terms of physical characteristics and roles.

Whereas previous studies have focused on reactions of women to female stereotypes, the current paper suggests that women and men alike react negatively to stereotyped portrayals of other genders.

The results indicate that marketers can benefit from adapting a more mindful approach to the portrayals of gender used in advertising.

The addition of a cross-gender perspective to the literature on gender stereotypes in advertising is a key contribution to this literature.

This paper uses archival documents to begin to recover a history of women’s leadership in the advertising industry. In particular, this paper aims to identify the leadership styles of the first five presidents of the New York League of Advertising Women’s (NYLAW) club. Their leadership from 1912 to 1926 set the course for and influenced the culture of the New York League. These five women laid the foundations of a social club that would also contribute to the professionalization of women in advertising, building industry networks for women, forging leadership and mentorship links among women, providing advertising education exclusively for women and, finally, bolstering women’s status in all avenues of advertising. The first five presidents were, of course, different characters, but each exhibited the traits associated with “transformational leaders,” leaders who prepare the “demos” for their own leadership roles. The women’s styles converged with their situational context to give birth to a women’s advertising club that, like most clubs, did charity work and hosted social events, but which was developed by the first five presidents to give women the same kinds of professional opportunities as the advertising men’s clubs provided their membership. The first five presidents of the Advertising League had strong prior professional credibility because of the careers they had constructed for themselves among the men who dominated the advertising field in the first decade of the 20th century. As presidents of the NYLAW, they advocated for better jobs, equal rights at work and better pay for women working in the advertising industry.

This paper draws on women’s advertising archival material from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe and Wisconsin Historical Society to argue that the five founding mothers of the NYLAW provided what can best be described as transformational feminist leadership, which resulted in building an effective club for their members and setting it on a trajectory of advocacy and education that would benefit women in the advertising industry for the next several decades. These women did not refer to themselves as “leaders,” they probably would not have considered their work in organizing the New York club an exercise in leadership, nor might they have called themselves feminists or seen their club as a haven for feminist work. However, by using modern leadership theories, the study can gain insight into how these women instantiated feminist ideals through a transformational leadership paradigm. Thus, the historical documents provide insight into the leadership roles and styles of some of the first women working in American advertising in the early parts of the 20th century.

Archival documents from the women’s advertising clubs can help us to understand women’s leadership practices and to reconstruct a history of women’s leadership in the advertising industry. Eight years before women in America could vote, the first five presidents shared with the club their wealth of collective experience – over two decades worth – as advertising managers, copywriters and space buyers. The first league presidents oversaw the growth of an organization would benefit both women and the advertising industry when they proclaimed that the women’s clubs would “improve the level of taste, ethics and knowledge throughout the communications industry by example, education and dissemination of information” (Dignam, 1952, p. 9). In addition, the club structure gave ad-women a collective voice which emerged through its members’ participation in building the club and through the rallying efforts of transformational leaders.

Historically, the advertising industry in the USA has been “pioneered” by male industry leaders such as Claude Hopkins, Albert Lasker and David Ogilvy. However, when the authors look to archival documents, it was found that women have played leadership roles in the industry too. Drawing on historical methodology, this study reconstructs a history of women’s leadership in the advertising and marketing industries.

This paper helps to understand how women participated in leadership roles in the advertising industry, which, in turn, enabled other women to build careers in the industry.

This paper aims to examine how women working in the advertising industry during the 1920s and 1930s encouraged and resisted stereotypes about women to establish a professional identity. This seemingly paradoxical approach provided women with opportunities for professional development and network building. Dorothy Dignam is presented as a case study of one such advertising woman. She was a market researcher, a teacher, an advocate for women’s employment in advertising, a historian of women’s advertising clubs and a supporter of and a contributor to women’s professional networking.

Archival material is drawn from the N. W. Ayer and Son archives at the Smithsonian Institute, the Advertising Women of New York archives and the Dorothy Dignam Papers at the Schlesinger Library, the Philadelphia Club of Advertising Women papers at Bryn Mawr, the Dignam Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Women’s Advertising Club of Chicago (WACC) archives at the University of Illinois, Chicago. A close reading method of analysis places the material in a historical context. Additionally, it provides a narrative structure to demonstrate the complementary relationship between advertising club work and professional identity.

Dignam’s career strategies helped her to construct a professional identity that situated her as a guide, teacher and role model for other women who worked in advertising. She supported and created an attitude that enabled aspiring career women to embark on their careers, and she assisted in creating a coalition of women who empowered each other through their advertising club work.

Dignam’s published work about careers for women in advertising, her own career and its advancement and her involvement with women’s advertising clubs all served a rhetorical purpose. Her professional life sought to change both men’s and women’s attitudes about the impact of women in professional roles. In turn, the influence of attitudes helped to create space for women in business, especially those seeking advertising careers.

This paper illustrates how Dignam’s career, accomplishments and publications coalesce to provide evidence of how women negotiated professional identities and claimed space for themselves in the business world and in the advertising industry.

This article aims to explore the work lives and contributions of a group of women employed at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in the early twentieth century.

Archival source material from the J. Walter Thompson Company archives at Duke University includes personnel files, advertising campaign reports, and meeting minutes. The archival work is placed in historical context.

The J. Walter Thompson Women's Editorial Department played a significant role in the development of advertising and in furthering women's opportunities as advertising professionals.

Advertising was one of the few male‐dominated professions open to women in the early years of the twentieth century. An exploration of these women's work experiences greatly enhances our understanding of the field, of women's roles as advertisers, and of women's roles as consumers.

The purpose of this study is to examine cross‐cultural differences in gender role portrayals in web ads in Korea and the USA on the basis of Hofstede's masculinity dimension.

A quantitative content analysis was employed to obtain a numerically‐based summary of different themes and roles portrayed by women and men in 400 web ads.

A greater percentage of Korean ads featured characters in relationship themes, featured women as a main character, and portrayed them in family and recreational roles. To a large extent, the results validate the use of Hofstede's taxonomy, supporting the application of “masculinity” framework into the determination of appropriate advertising appeals‐related to gender roles.

International advertisers who are planning a global campaign for their gender‐related consumer products can benefit by locating the target country's position on Hofstede's masculinity index and using it as a guideline for creating visual images of main characters in the ads.

This study adds a new contribution to an international account of web advertising in maintaining a comprehensive understanding of contemporary gender role portrayals. It could benefit international advertisers with both practical and theoretical implications, for no systematic studies have ever touched the gender‐role issue with web advertising yet.

The purpose of this study is three‐fold: to provide recent evidence in the UK on the frequency of appearance of female role portrayals in print advertisements; to compare female role stereotypes across magazine types; and to explore the interface between female role stereotypes and product categories.

An integrative approach to content analysis was used in order to analyze advertising communication in print media. The sample consisted of n=3,830 advertisements published in ten high circulation UK magazines.

The study indicates that women in UK magazine advertisements are mainly portrayed in decorative roles; and that female role stereotypes vary significantly across magazine types. The findings also suggest that there is an association between product categories and female role stereotypes.

The study highlights the need for the advertising industry in the UK to adjust its communication practices to the changing role of women in society.

The study extends research in the area of female role stereotypes in print advertising by considering the frequency of female role portrayals across different magazine types; and investigating the association between product categories and female role stereotypes.

The purpose of this paper is to present a biographical review of the career of the late Caroline Robinson Jones (1942‐2001) in order to understand her challenges and contributions to the advertising profession. Prior to her death, she was considered the foremost African‐American woman in the advertising business. She was the first black woman to serve as a vice president of a major mainstream advertising agency and also established a respected agency bearing her own name. This paper focuses on Jones' contributions to marketing practice and her experiences as a woman of color in the advertising industry.

This paper uses a traditional historical narrative approach largely based on archival materials housed in the Caroline Jones Collection at the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. Relevant secondary literature was also employed to provide appropriate context.

While the advertising industry has historically been noted for its lack of diversity among its professional ranks, Jones made significant contributions to the industry. Yet, despite her trailblazing accomplishments, findings suggest her efforts were constrained by structural oppression in the industry concerning gender and race.

Scholarly literature reflecting the contributions and experiences of women of color in the advertising business is nearly non‐existent. This paper provides an analysis using sources which are valuable in understanding career opportunities and challenges for women of color in advertising professions.