Despite an overall improvement in the representation of women in advertising, women of colour, especially those with darker skin tones and older women were left behind.
While the representation of women of colour group improved 63% year on year, the group was still only represented in 21% of ads, according to the figures from Creative X’s latest “Gender in Advertising Report” which looked at over 32,000 global ads supported by £205m ($260m) in ad spend.
Moreover, women with lighter skin tones appeared in advertising four times more frequently than those with darker skin tones.
More starkly, ad spend on women with darker skin tones decreased 9% year-on-year according to the study, whilst ads-end on women with lighter skin tones increased by 2%.
Older women only appeared in 1.5% of all ads analysed, with older men 25% more likely to be present. Ads featuring people aged over 60 received just 1.2% of total ad spend.
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In addition, although the representation of women in more traditional roles such as family and domestic settings decreased substantially between 2022 (66%) and 2023 (30%), it remains higher than their representation in non-traditional roles like professional (8.5%).
Women in leadership were only represented in 3.4% of all the adverts.
“For years, the lack of progress on representative advertising has always been blamed on a lack of data, which hindered our ability to quantify the gap between where we wanted to be and where we were. Our industry dedicated lots of air time to talking about the problem, so many assumed we were getting better at inclusively representing people in ads,” said Creative X founder and CEO Anastasia Leng.
She added: “Well, the data’s here and it shows yet again that intent isn’t translating into action. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and it requires ongoing measurement to drive sustainable progress. ”
“Advancements in technology now enable us to track and measure the creative decisions we’re making, in near real-time, including breaking out how we’re casting and portraying and determining if those decisions map to what we know about our consumers and our changing demographic trends.”
