The Pragmatic Analysis of How Gender Roles Are Portrayed on Billboard Advertisements in Cameroon

Abstract

This paper aims to navigate the rich academic literature on multimodal analysis and gender portrayal in billboard advertising and provide an overview of key findings and trends observed throughout the years. For several years, women in advertising were likely to be depicted in traditional and domestic roles and were excluded from empowering roles and professional settings.  Male depictions have also changed, moving from mere tradition and masculine portrayals to a greater variety of roles. Since humans create the concept of gender socially, gender is referred to as a social construction. This is demonstrated by the fact that individuals, groups, and societies ascribe particular traits, statuses, or values to individuals purely because of their sex. Nevertheless, these ascriptions differ across societies and cultures. The gender Schema Theory by Bern (1981) and Williamson's (1978) representation theory has been used to analyse this work.