Switch on the television during prime time and you’ll sit through fifteen to twenty commercials in a single break. Scroll through five reels on your phone and at least two will be ads disguised as content. Advertising is everywhere, and it works precisely because it doesn’t feel like persuasion. It feels like information, entertainment, even friendly advice. But underneath the jingles and the punchlines sits a carefully built message about who we should be, what we should buy, and how men and women are supposed to behave. That message has been repeating a very old, very narrow script for a very long time.
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The quiet power of advertising to persuade
Advertisements don’t just sell soap or scooters. They sell identity. Every commercial links a product to a lifestyle, a social class, a gender, or a value system, and the sheer repetition of these images shapes how audiences learn to see the world. This is social learning in action: viewers absorb what is shown as “normal” behaviour for men and women simply because they see it modelled again and again. Over time, these patterns stop looking like marketing choices and start looking like common sense, even when they reinforce outdated ideas about who belongs where.
Same script, different genders: stereotypical portrayals
Look closely at any hour of advertising and a pattern jumps out. Men are shown as autonomous, competent, and occupationally diverse, appearing as pilots, entrepreneurs, engineers, and car owners. Women are far more often confined to the home. A joint study by UNICEF and the Geena Davis Institute analysed the 1,000 most-watched Indian advertisements on television and YouTube and found that male characters were twice as likely as female characters to be shown holding a paid job, actually working, occupying leadership positions, or making decisions about their own future. Women, on the other hand, were more frequently shown as married, managing household decisions, or performing caregiving duties.
This isn’t a coincidence of casting. It reflects a consistent creative choice: men advertise vehicles, business products, and job websites, while women advertise detergents, cooking oils, and kitchen appliances. Even in 2019, one of the most common character tropes for women in Indian ads, per the same research, was “the subservient wife,” while men were most often cast as the “domineering or controlling male.” The commercial break, in other words, has its own gender roles, and they rarely overlap.
Women’s many masks in advertising
Women don’t get one stereotype in advertising; they get several, switched depending on the product being sold. She is the sari-clad mother whose entire purpose is to please her family. She is the glamorous, seductive figure used to catch the eye. She is, occasionally, the independent career woman breaking free of both moulds. The problem is that even this “independent” portrayal is usually built around appearance rather than achievement.
The homemaker, the seductress, and the go-getter
The seductive portrayal in particular has measurable weight. The same UNICEF-backed study found that female characters in Indian ads were nine times more likely to be described as “stunning,” six times more likely to appear in sexually revealing clothing, four times more likely to be shown partially nude, and five times more likely to be sexually objectified compared with male characters. These aren’t isolated creative decisions scattered across a handful of ads; they represent a pattern spread across an entire year of the most-viewed commercials in the country.
Selling him with her body
The most telling example of this pattern shows up in advertisements meant for men. Male grooming products such as deodorant, aftershave, soap, and even briefs are routinely sold using women’s bodies rather than men’s. This lines up with what scholars call objectification theory: the idea that being visually evaluated by others, rather than seen as a whole person, pushes women to become constantly self-conscious about how their bodies appear to onlookers. When a fragrance ad implies that a man’s product choice earns him a woman’s attention, it isn’t selling scent. It’s selling a fantasy of control, with the woman reduced to a prize rather than a person.
The fairness myth and the cost to body image
No conversation about gender stereotypes in Indian advertising is complete without fairness creams. For decades, these commercials followed an almost identical formula: a dark-skinned woman is rejected by a prospective employer or a marriage proposal, uses a fairness product, and is instantly “rewarded” with the job or the groom. The underlying message was blunt: dark skin is a disqualification, and only fair, slim, tall women are truly beautiful or “complete.”
The scale of this industry made the message hard to escape. Reports at the time pegged the Indian fairness cream and bleach market in the thousands of crores, a business built almost entirely on manufactured insecurity. In 2014, the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) stepped in with dedicated guidelines for this category, stating that advertisements should not reinforce negative stereotypes based on skin colour or portray darker-skinned people as unattractive, unhappy, or less likely to succeed at work or marriage. Campaigns like actor Nandita Das’s “Dark is Beautiful” pushed the same point from outside the industry, arguing that colourism in advertising had real psychological costs for young women who internalised the idea that their skin tone determined their worth.
Yet these guidelines are self-regulatory rather than legally binding, which limits how strictly they’re enforced. As recently as a parliamentary session, the government reiterated in the Rajya Sabha that ASCI’s code prohibits ads from communicating skin-colour-based discrimination, a sign that the issue is still being actively monitored rather than fully resolved. Brands have shifted language, swapping “fairness” for “glow” or “radiance,” but critics argue the underlying beauty standard, thin, tall, and light-skinned, remains largely intact under a softer vocabulary.
Why the fine print of gender roles actually matters
None of this is purely academic. A review of three decades of research on gender portrayal in Indian advertisements found that stereotypical and, at times, degrading depictions of women persist across nearly every product category studied, from magazines to television. Repeated exposure to these images has consequences: it narrows what young viewers believe is possible for their own gender, discourages men from being shown in caregiving roles, and quietly teaches women that their value is tied to appearance rather than ability. There are early signs of change, with more recent tracking studies suggesting a slow improvement in how women are represented, but the pace remains gradual compared to how quickly advertising evolves in every other respect.
Advertisers ultimately have a choice most other storytellers don’t: a captive, repeat audience, and thirty seconds to say something about the world. What they choose to say in that window adds up over years into a shared, if unspoken, idea of what “normal” looks like for men and women. Recognising the pattern is the first step to questioning it every time it appears on screen.
What do you think? The next time an ad break plays, notice who is shown working and who is shown at home. Do you think brands are changing these portrayals because attitudes have shifted, or because avoiding backlash is now better for business?
References
- https://geenadavisinstitute.org/research/gender-bias-and-inclusion-in-advertising-in-india/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4290473/
- https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/fairness-cream-makers-welcome-new-ad-norms-114082100011_1.html
- https://www.deccanherald.com/india/ads-shouldnt-communicate-any-discrimination-as-a-result-of-skin-colour-says-choubey-in-rajya-sabha-890353.html
- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-94277-9_40
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