Gender transformative advertising pedagogy: promoting gender justice through marketing education

ABSTRACT

We introduce a feminist pedagogical approach to marketing education through designing gender transformative advertising pedagogy, to promote diversity, ethics and gender justice in the classroom towards developing more inclusive industry practice and cultures. We detail how this was implemented through feminist praxis and a problem-based learning assessment task. Our analysis highlights that the feminist classroom raises consciousness of sexist advertising which can awaken students to unconscious gender biases. Further, we demonstrate how gender transformative advertising pedagogy encourages students to confront representational conventions of gender, with students aiming to portray diverse subjectivities yet struggling to transform femininity and relying on more ‘palatable’ forms of masculinity. Finally, we make the case for the marketing classroom as a site for gender justice, where through incremental action students come to link gendered structures with marketing practices and become equipped to act as agents of feminist change in and beyond the classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender transformative
• gender stereotypes
• feminist pedagogy
• critical pedagogy
• gender and advertising
• marketing education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/philadelphia-cheese-advert-banned-over-claims-it-suggests-men-unable-to-care-for-children-a4212621.html.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren Gurrieri

Lauren Gurrieri is an Associate Professor of Marketing at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research examines gender, consumption and the marketplace, with a focus on gender-based inequalities in consumer and digital cultures.

Fiona Finn

Fiona Finn is an Associate Lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include creative advertising, gender and advertising and social marketing.