An exploratory study of the effect of sex role stereotyping on attitudes toward magazine advertisements

In this study, sex role portrayals were manipulated in an advertisement created for the study. The roles used were professional and housewife. One hundred one respondents chosen from several southwest towns were exposed to either the professional version of the ad or the housewife version, and were asked to evaluate the ad on a semantic differential scale. One of the items in the scale was an evaluation of the role of the individual in the ad, and was used in a manipulation check. The result of the ad evaluations indicated significantly higher scores for the professional version of the ad than for the housewife version.