Portrayal of Women in Pakistani Magazines: Do Magazines Stereotype Women as Model?

Abstract

This research article describes the portrayal of women given by the three Urdu weekly magazines of Pakistan, the ‗Akhbar-e-Jahan‘ the ‗Mashriq‘ and the ‗Nawa-e-waqt‘ for three months period. The findings reveal that all the three weeklies devoted significant space to women pictorial portrayal mostly showed them with different products like modern dress, long hair and short hair style as object of appeal—model, actress, singer, and dancer—by all pages particularly by their titles and central fold pages, as compared to their picture spaces to the same showed them in achieved roles (teacher, doctor, social & health worker, politician, administrator and businesswoman) and traditional roles (mother, housewife, sister, and daughter). T-test statistics explore significant difference between pictorial space wise coverage by ‗Akhbar-e-Jahan‘, ‗Mashriq‘ and ‗Nawa-e-waqt‘. While the same test shows little but no significant difference between the picture spaces coverage to women by weekly ‗Mashriq‘ and weekly ‗Nawa-e-waqt.‘ It is interesting to mention that all the three magazines specific focus remained on portraying young and beautiful girls as model or sex object.