AAYP 2019 Youth Ambassadors Scholarship

Maisha Maliha

Submission Title: “Media Misrepresentation of Women”

If I ask you to close your eyes and imagine a superhero flying around the sky, or a firefighter running to the rescue, or even a chief executive officer of a successful company, would you imagine this character to be a woman? The chances are that the majority of people will answer that men are what they had in their minds in those scenarios. This lack of female representation in roles dominated by men has been constantly reinforced throughout the media for many decades and is one of the major universal issues we face today.

Being an inescapable form of communication, media has transformed our attitudes and viewpoints through its’ independent space where people can share their personal opinions, discuss and gain knowledge on certain topics. A dangerous effect of open communication is that it may create misleading ideas that the masses may believe as factual information.  We see it in many films where female characters are often used to help the male characters develop and grow.  Take the popular TV show “The Big Bang Theory” for example where the male lead Sheldon often intellectually degrades Penny, the female character who lives next door.  Penny’s character in the series is insignificant and her role seems to promote the stereotypical viewpoint that men like to show their success and dominance in their social group. Another example of media illustrating a stereotypical viewpoint is the Mr. Clean’s “Cleaner of Your Dreams” advertisement where the tagline is, “You gotta love a man who cleans.”   From this advertisement, viewers are given the idea that men do not ordinarily clean and if they do, there should be some kind of praise or rewards for them. Through every possible form of media, women have been consistently portrayed in domestic roles, highly sexualized or eroticized roles, and inferior to men. If the media displayed women as anything but the reality, misconceptions about women’s roles in our society might not exist today.

There are millions of other girls, including myself, whose perceptions of “women’s roles” have been influenced by media. This is high time we, as a community, come together and find a way to fix this issue of misrepresentation of women in the media. We, as a society, can educate the younger generation about the egalitarian principle that all individuals, regardless of gender, have the same self-worth.  From kindergarten to college or beyond college, if students are thoroughly educated about gender similarities, rather than gender differences, along with gender values and biases, and practiced this knowledge as they grow up, the new generation will not be inclined to assign gender-specific roles on anyone; rather they would be able to identify and call out stereotypes fostered by the media. This would be a much slower process to change, but the result would be more positive.

We may not be able to create a world from scratch where media representation is fair, but we can improve our existing communities through our own efforts. As we take appropriate actions to educate the younger generations on gender studies, we can also use the media to bring awareness of the misrepresentation of women. Youths can use their voices to protest, hold press conferences, and publicize the need to end this stereotypical, biased treatment towards women. We can encourage established organizations and companies with influence (and money) to push the media in the right direction.   This method will allow us to do “damage control” until the new generation is ready to share their unbiased viewpoints and knowledge to the rest of the world and create a fairer world for men and women to coexist together. If we do not take any initiative against this issue on our part, we will likely put our younger generations’ futures at risk by allowing history to repeat itself.