Deconstructing Gender: Lahore Youth’s Response to Non-Stereotypical Gender Advertising

Abstract

This study examines the effects of non-stereotypical gender advertising on the cognitive schemas of the youth. It addresses the main concern of probing positive or negative interpretations of non-stereotypical media messages by the audience based on their gender. An in-depth literature review points out that different methodologies, objectives and conclusions are given about the stereotypical representation of gender in advertisements but non-stereotypical gender role portrayals are still not discussed very much. Experimental method is utilized to find out the interpretation of the youth by pretest and posttest questionnaires. The instrument of the study is two advertisements showing non-stereotypical gender roles. The sample size is consisted on (N=100) males (n=50), females (n=50). The sample is taken from different colleges of Lahore. Descriptive frequencies and t-test are found out through SPSS analysis. Results indicate that there is difference in the pre-test and post-test results, which shows that there is likely to be a positive impact of non-stereotypical gender advertising on both males and females, but there is likely to be no significant gender difference in perceiving non-stereotypical advertisements.