Since last International Women’s Day, brands have made serious strides in getting to grips with how to portray women.

Tess Lowery, strategist and copywriter at BBH London

So what did 2020 hold for women in the real world? Research suggests women leaders (including New Zealand, Germany, Finland and Bangladesh) responded better to the clusterfuck that was COVID-19 where responses were more efficient, death rates were lower and shit got done faster. Across the pond, the US elected its first woman vice-president whilst Scotland made period products free for all. It was also the year two women took home the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Brazil and Sierra Leone closed the gender pay gap for female and male footballers. Globally, the share of women in senior management is increasing and, at the time of writing, 87% of global mid-market companies have at least one woman in a senior management role.

But did adland reflect it? 

Showing that you can have boobs without cars

Frida Mom, rejected from 2020's Oscars, has come back even bigger and bolder in 2021. This time there are actual naked breasts in the spot called ‘Stream of Lactation’, and not a sports car in sight! Instead it's a brutally honest portrayal of breastfeeding, brimming with humanity.

Older women get a look in

Vaseline’s spot ‘Visible scars, invisible strength: lady without fingerprints’ depicts a 71-year-old protagonist, who tells the story of how she overcame gender discrimination in her 40-year career as a blade-sharpener. The message? Vaseline isn’t just about beauty, it’s also about care.

Continuing the menstruation conversation

Last year, Libresse/Bodyform took their #BloodNormal to the next level with ‘Womb Stories’, a campaign that chronicled just that: from the furnace of an endometriosis sufferer’s uterus to the turbulent story of a lesbian couple’s attempts to conceive. This visceral film was the kick up the backside the sector needed. The sequel, ‘Pain Stories’, also packs a punch by shining a light on the ‘gender pain gap’ - the idea that female pain is sidelined and dismissed by the medical community, and all too often written off as a normal part of womanhood. This phenomenon means women are often misdiagnosed or prescribed the wrong treatment by doctors. For endometriosis (a disorder that affects around 176 million women in the world), it takes an average of 7.5 years for a woman to receive a diagnosis.

Tackling repressive and sexist sexual conventions

On Valentine’s last year, Durex challenged sexual taboos, stigmas and outdated attitudes towards sex in favour. Someone said it - at last!

Showing women as leaders

Last International Women’s Day, Mindspace, a company that offers flexible shared workspaces to professionals, aired ‘Can You Solve the Riddle?’. It shows them running an experiment in which 22 individuals are asked to solve a riddle about a son being called by his Trader CEO parent whilst he’s sitting next to his father. No, he doesn’t have two dads. The Trader CEO is his mother. But no one in the experiment twigs that. 

Girl gamers

Coca Cola’s latest ad ‘Open That Coca Cola’ features two gamers - both girls. The best thing about this one is the ad isn’t even ostensibly about gaming.

Women with disabilities

Ellie Goldstein caught the world’s attention after starring in a campaign for Gucci Beauty in 2020 and her photo became Gucci’s most-liked Instagram post ever (with over 860k likes).

Brands’ representations of women haven’t significantly improved – but people are getting better at calling out negative ones

Mara Dettmann, strategist and editor at BBH London

“Advertising has come a long way in how it represents straight, white women, but still has a blindspot for any other type of womanhood.”

Since Labs last wrote about depictions of women in advertising, the world has turned upside down. And women bore the brunt of it: their job losses due to Covid-19 were 1.8 times greater than men’s on a global level, and more women felt compelled to leave the workforce to cope with the demands of lockdowns.

At the same time, it’s generally more women than men who are managing their children’s remote education as well as cooking and cleaning. Again, it’s a global trend across countries including the UK, US, Japan, and India.

These developments added an interesting dynamic to the UK Government’s January 2021 campaign encouraging people to stay home: while the images reflected the realities of lockdown gender roles (the women homeschooling and doing housework), it didn’t try to address the underlying issue – or acknowledge that there is an underlying issue.

However: instead of accepting it without question, people across the internet (and not just women) called out the ad for its stereotyping. The result was fast, as the ad was taken down on the same day the topic trended on UK Twitter, and the incident was covered by publications with global reach including the BBC and The Guardian. 

Beyond the government comms, brands also put out their fair share of gender stereotyped comms – but again they were called out quickly.

The UK isn’t the only country where gender stereotyping still prevails: though Singapore’s workforce is relatively strong in terms of gender balance, ads in Singapore are six times more likely to show women doing domestic chores than men, and men are 32% more likely to be featured in lead roles.

And it’s not just that ads perpetuating sexist stereotypes are still being created – it’s also that ads that work against them are still subject to censorship.

Last September, Australia-based period underwear company Modibodi launched a short film as part of the New Way to Period campaign to “break down stigma, start open dialogues, and normalise periods.” Facebook banned the film for violating advertising guidelines regarding “shocking, sensational, disrespectful, or excessively violent content.” 

And as recently as last week, Facebook banned breastfeeding campaign ads for Tommee Tippee’s ‘The Boob Life’.

But again: the mere fact that people are speaking out about these ads being banned in progress – so hopefully by the time International Women’s Day 2022 comes around, we’ll only need one article: “Brands’ representations of women continue to improve”.