Sex Stereotyping in Drug Advertisements: Evaluation of the Informal Curriculum.

A study to determine sex stereotyping in drug advertisements in five professional journals is reported. The first four studies examined advertisements from general medical journals; the fifth study obtained its data from a psychiatric journal. The journals are "Medical Economics,""American Family Physician,""Modern Medicine,""Journal of the American Medical Association," and the "Journal of Psychiatry." Research focused on relationships among the gender of the models, the type of drug advertised, and the kinds of activities engaged in by models. Results indicate that in spite of a decade of rapid social change, an important segment of the advertising industry persists in perpetuating outmoded stereotypes. The most persistent were advertisements depicting men as productive and active professionally and women as passive, sexual, domestic, and preoccupied with personal concerns. Of 77 models appearing as health professionals 62 were physicians, all male, and 15 were nurses, all female. A tendency was noted to overportray women in advertisements for psychotropic drugs and men in advertisements for hypertensive drugs. This tendency reinforces the notion that women's illnesses are largely emotional in origin while those of men are organic or due to work pressures. These implications are significant in that drug advertising is an informal but influential part of the continuing education of health professionals, and biased advertisements could possibly cause different behavior toward males and females. (Author/KC)