The Link Between Perception of Female Images in Sport Clothes Adverting and Personal Characteristics

Perception of female images is a common condition which has considerable impact on women’s empowerment in society. One of the big challenges is to determine what influences people’s perception of women in advertising. There is a growing body of literature that outlines the tendency of changing female images in mass-media, but not much research about consumers’ attitude to these changes. The general purpose of this research is to identify the connection between personal characteristics like level of self-esteem, type of sexism and gender identity and perception of different women images. The study was carried out in two steps. At the first stage the pilot study was conducted to select the video-advertisements of sports clothes with clearly identified female images (decorative, non-traditional and neutral). At the second stage, the participants was asked to take a survey which will contain Self-esteem Scale, Ambivalent Sexism Inventory and Ingroup Identity Scale, watch a video commercial featuring women and evaluate the female image. The results demonstrated that there are significant differences in perception of neutral, non-traditional and decorative female images by people with different levels of sexism, self-esteem and identity with males/females; also they emphasis the most important criterias of perception for people with different levels. This research contributes to understanding of perception processes of female images in video commercials and finding better way to depict different types of female image in advertisements, which can help to decrease gender stereotypes.