Gendered Ageism: The New Sexism in Advertising

*Originally posted in CreativeBrief BITE.

“As soon as I turned 50, advertisers suddenly stopped telling me I should buy Chanel and started telling me I smelled of wee.” Earlier this year at Creative Equals’ Rise conference Havas’ Vicki Maguire aptly put into words the shared experience that older women face when it comes to representation in advertising.

If not absent from communications completely, older women are used to reinforce lazy, damaging stereotypes reserved for the likes of anti-aging products. Where women hold around 80% of the purchase power, dismissing them is lazy at best and at worst bad business strategy.

Lack of representation on screen is reflective of an industry with a working environment where older women are also dismissed. With the pandemic having disproportionately affected women and 85% of the industry lacking a menopause policy, simply not enough is being done to retain older women.

Some campaigns are already working to shifting the dial toward greater representation and fighting against taboos such as the likes of Tena’s #LastLonelyMenopause and Prodigious and VivaWomen!’s #BreaktheBias but there remains room for more representation especially in campaigns that aren’t centered around stereotypically ‘female’ issues.

CreativeBrief asked industry experts, including Lucy Taylor, Chief Growth Officer at MullenLowe Group UK, should brands be doing a better job of representing and reflecting the experiences of older women in advertising?
Over 55s already make up 47% of the population and – by 2040 – will account for 63% of the UK’s national spending power. Yet representation of this group in the media is horrifyingly scarce. According to research conducted by Channel 4, just 12% of advertisements feature someone over 50 in a lead role. These people are invisible, and conspicuous in their absence in Adland’s attempts to portray the world realistically.

On the rare occasions women aged over 55 are represented in ads, it’s often a misrepresentation. Given the majority of ads featuring older members of society are for age-related products, such as chairlifts, equity releases and incontinence pads, it’s no surprise that 44% of British women aged 50 and over find advertising to be patronizing, while 15% were depressed or disheartened by the way advertisements treated them

What these ads ignore is that older women are active members of society – they go to work, go out to eat, use technology, watch movies, wear makeup – the reality is a stark contrast with the cliché we see circulated, where older women are often shown as static, forgetful and useless with tech.

Brands need to fix up or risk alienating a substantial portion of their audience.