Home Depot Gender Stereotypes

The Home Depot is a supplier of home goods and appliances such as refrigerators, grills, and paint. The store often uses visual advertisements to attract customers. In these ads there are portrayals of both men and women, which help to illustrate the gender scripts that are prevalent within society. To analyze these illustrations and come to conclusions in terms of stereotypical gender scripts in commercials, a visual sociology research project was completed.

Three different types of visual sociology are mentioned in a visual sociology Wikipedia article. The method chosen for our project is to study the visual data produced by cultures. Some ways of doing this suggested in the article were to research different forms of “art, photographs,

Once this was determined, we concluded that we wanted to analyze a visual artifact with a producer of home goods that would be aimed at men and women equally. We decided on Home Depot as this store is viewed as being a men’s store, yet sells some products that would be marketed towards women. Home Depot sells a variety of items ranging from lumber, appliances, plants, hardware, tools, lawn mowers, paint and even outdoor furniture. We focused our research on Home Depot commercials. We selected four very different commercials and each analyzed them. We focused our research on the gender of the individuals in the commercials, the wording used to sell the products being marketed, the colors shown in the commercials, how each gender was depicted in the commercials, and what their roles

Where commercials that are selling a product to women focus on beauty or the ease of use using wording like sleek clean lines, soft, makes life easier. This is because men are portrayed as being masculine and being responsible for outdoor chores like lawn maintenance where as women are portrayed as delicate and weak and tend to be in charge of daily in home chores like cooking, and cleaning. While analyzing the genders used in the commercials and what the roles were we found that the women tended to do the shopping and asking the questions about products and the men seemed to be bored and were there to pay the bill and be the one responsible for the assembly of the product purchased. The colors of the products being sold play important role as well. Men seem to be more attracted to darker or bolder colors like black, red, green, and blue where products for women are usually lighter or softer colors like white, or pastels.

We chose to analyze commercials because we were able to focus our research on both what is said, as well as what is shown. The seller has basically thirty seconds to get the viewer interested in a product and make them want to go out and buy it. They do everything possible to attract the buyer, keep them interested, and sell that product. This made the research much easier to analyze because we were able to break the commercials apart. What did they