March 7, 2017

How do Singaporean women’s magazines represent women?

International Women’s Day (IWD) falls on 8 March and celebrates women’s economic, political, and social achievements, and advocates accelerating gender equality. The Singapore Council of Women’s Organizations marked IWD in 2016 with the theme ‘Marching to our own beat’ and inducted 14 outstanding women–two Supreme Court Judges, six Sportswomen, two Food Personalities, a Diplomat, an Activist/Advocate, a Medical Aid Worker, and a Community/Social Worker–into the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame.

In Are You a “Woman”? Representation of Femininity in Two Women’s Magazines in Singapore, Cleo and Her World (Communication Research Papers, 2014), A/P Iccha Basnyat and A/P Leanne Chang (Department of CNM) looked at one of the ways women are represented in Singapore by analysing 482 articles in 24 issues of the nation’s top two women’s magazines, Cleo and Her World, focusing on tone, character, author, and supplementary photographs, as well as story, genre, feminine attributes, and masculine attributes. Two polarizing images of women dominated the magazines: the traditional feminine woman and the modern, independent, career woman. The magazines employed more masculine traits when portraying women as individuals, and more feminine traits when portraying women in relation to other people. For example, inability to deal with pressure, submissiveness, indecisiveness, and dependence appeared often in articles about relationships, while beauty, lifestyle, and health articles included characterizations of women as active, persistent, and confident, as well as emotional, gentle, and slim. Readers of Cleo and Her World are presented with the message that women should be more traditionally feminine in relationships with others, but are permitted to incorporate some masculine traits into their self-presentation.

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