Phar­ma and health­care ads miss the mark on re­al­is­tic por­tray­als of women — study

Many women don’t see them­selves in phar­ma and health­care ad­ver­tis­ing — but they want to. The gap is de­tailed in a new study that asked women how they’re be­ing de­pict­ed in health­care ads ver­sus the way they ac­tu­al­ly see them­selves.

Ad­ver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing hold­ing com­pa­ny WPP part­nered with the See­Her non-prof­it gen­der bias fight­er on the “Health On Her Terms” sur­vey of more than 1,500 women and non-bi­na­ry peo­ple in the US. It found that women, in gen­er­al, felt un­der­rep­re­sent­ed in health­care ad­ver­tis­ing and me­dia across a range of per­son­al iden­ti­fiers, in­clud­ing ed­u­ca­tion, oc­cu­pa­tion, na­tion­al­i­ty, lan­guage, weight or body size and so­cioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus.

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