Advertisement has become a pervasive if not integral element of internet activities. In fact, we live inside them; the rolling billboards at bus stops, LED screens in elevators, or the launch ads when opening up social media. Advertisement has stepped away from serving as the transition between programs to the wallpaper of our digital lives.
Advertisers fight for users’ attention in various ways with the goal of gaining traction and engagement for exposure and ultimately profitability. Knowing that attention span is a scarce resource, advertisers innovate ways to compete for our attention via story telling: how we should look, what we should want, and who we could become.
Today we want to talk about gendered advertising and how it seeps then affects our way of thinking. The scripts about masculinity and femininity start to feel normal (1–3). Slowly but surely they shape how we understand gender. These gendered stories take advantage of sociolinguistics and news framing to reach wider audiences, since debatable narratives attract more discussions.
The Gender Scripts We Live By「1」
Sociolinguistics explores the mechanism through which social dynamics influence language use (4). It is a mirror that reflects prevailing social attitudes, trends, and standards. Expressions such as “run like a girl” (5), “A woman’s life isn’t complete until she has children (一个女人这辈子没小孩是不完整的)” from the film B for Busy (爱情神话) (6), or the popular impression that “girls play with dolls and boys trucks” (7–9). Sociolinguistics as a tool shows us that language is never neutral, as passive and indivisible as it might be. The issue with “run like a girl” does not lie in its description, rather, its meaning in our gendered reality. It presumes that doing something like a girl is inherently inferior in comparison to that of a boy or man. It transcends biology and becomes a cultural metaphor that generalizes girls to be weak. It reflects the social attitude on gender and competence.
Sha’Cari Richardson’s Olympic debut in Paris, 2024. Getty Image: Hannah Peters.
「1」Inspired by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book The Metaphors We Live By
The advertisement video Dream Crazier by Nike (2) tells the same using female athletes as an example to highlight the double-standard practice in regards to emotion: being called dramatic or crazy for their desire for success. In the same vein, CBS Sunday’s interview with Taylor Swift highlighted the cultural script where (business) women’s expression of emotions are painted in a negative light via verbiage like "calculated", whereas men are considered “strategic” (10).
The scriptwriting of B for Busy is also a powerful example of a cultural script (6). In social science, the concept of script is the complex package of expected behaviors for specific situations. Just like actresses in movies follow their script provided by directors, people in their everyday lives follow social scripts to know how to act in accordance to their situations. One of the ways to conceptualize scripts is to view it as something woven into the fabric of our world, from which we ultimately learn “cohesive, institution-specific modes of acting” (3). The film’s dialogue vocalizes the life-course script for women, as it frames motherhood as an essential element of womanhood. This gender script essentially renders childbearing as an essential element of womanhood, otherwise females face a gaping wound of incompleteness.
Journalism: The Gendered Show
In understanding scripts using sociolinguistics, let’s now take what we have learned and apply the lesson to the seemingly neutral field of journalism. Welcome to the Gendered Show, a production where news outlets go beyond reporting to casting events with a gender filter. In this show, women often are assigned visible and emotionally charged roles; victims or perpetrators even when they are rather far removed from the core problem at hand, resulting in a skewed reporting of the news story. Gender bias in reporting is systematic, evidenced by news outlets quoting men and women at different frequencies depending on the subject; women are more often quoted on lifestyle topics while men on business topics (11).
These gendered patterns are particularly pronounced in negative news coverage. For instance, Chinese news covering domestic violence tend to over-represent wives as “intentional homicide offenders” but husbands as “accidental killers” (12). British newspapers are no exception, as women are overly sexualized and “reduc[ed]...entirely to sexual commodities,” contributing little to no value to the news itself (13). The article referenced a joint report evaluating UK news’ portrayal of women, in which British news are found to “blam[e] or [neglect] the victim whilst empathising with the perpetrator” (14). This troublesome finding warrants our attention because they go beyond neutral reporting to reinforce prevailing social norms and scripts. When journalism sexualizes women’s bodies and trauma and purposefully neglects the perpetrator's role, journalism effectively becomes the vehicle for sexualization and objectification of women.
In fact, users discussions on Xiaohongshu (Red, 小红书) also engage with the phenomenon where perpetrator becomes invisible (加害者隐身) in news reporting (15,16). A news coverage on 10 wanted individuals for various reasons sparked heated discussions on the internet (17). The title contained a partial name of a female fugitive for illegally opening a casino but the remaining 9 are all males (17,18). Such disproportionate visibility of females highlights how gendered framing in journalism can determine who becomes the face of wrongdoing and who remains anonymous.
Image from Red post to illustrate the anonymity of perpetrator in news reporting (19)
Ironically enough, the same logic appears in positive news coverage as well. In a widely reported incident when a passerby rescued a child from an oncoming truck within 3 seconds (20,21), the title Life saved by an arm (用一只手臂托举起“生命的重量”) did not acknowledge that the heroic act was performed by a woman. By contrast, the gender of the heroes in two other similar stories were clearly expressed (20): Young male fought armed attacker as stabbing happened in a subway (地铁内乘客徒遭猛刺，小伙勇斗持刀歹徒) and men in white saved mother and daughter in danger (母女危在旦夕，白衣男子上前施救).
作者：Lexi
Reference:
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6.B for Busy (爱情神话). 2021.
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10. CBS Sunday Morning. Taylor Swift on “Lover” and haters [Internet]. Youtube; 2019 [cited 2026 Jan 16]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDzhoofkRJI
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13. Five things about women in the press. BBC News [Internet]. 2012 Nov 30 [cited2026 Jan 16]; Available from: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20554942
14. Eaves, End Violence Against Women Coalition, Equality Now, OBJECT. ‘Just theWomen’* An evaluation of eleven British national newspapers’ portrayal of women over a two week period in September 2012, including recommendations on press regulation reform in order to reduce harm to, and discrimination against, women. 2012 Nov p. 33.
15. 💜飒喾SaKu💜. 小红书. 2025 [cited 2026 Jan 16]. 加害者的名字，更应该被我们记住而不是隐身. Available from:https://www.xiaohongshu.com/explore/68842bf0000000001203c832
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19. 爆bao. 小红书. 2024 [cited 2026 Jan 16]. 个人觉得第二张才是正常客观的新闻标题. Available from: https://www.xiaohongshu.com/explore/66d0aa69000000001d03981a
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21. 任然. 用一只手臂托举起“生命的重量.” 2025 June 28 [cited 2026 Jan 16];Available from:https://finance.sina.com.cn/jjxw/2025-06-28/doc-infcqeax2130294.shtml?froms=ggmp
