Gender stereotyping used in the media for the recruitment of women to the British Army

This blog is written by Paige Salvage, a student at Cardiff University. She has been studying relevant sociological theories and methods for how we can understand the digital society and how the Internet shapes our everyday lives.

 

The recent development of government legislation allowing female soldiers into infantry positions has resulted in extensive sociological interest in the changing role of women in the Army. Stiehm (1988) suggested that women in the Army have fixed stereotypes, “whores or lesbians” suggesting that serving female soldiers have both sexual and sexuality foci. Assuming this is true, Goffman’s (1976:9) suggests that “gender displays […] reflect fundamental features of the social structure” in the Army. This study considered how images that have been used across social media, in particular the British Army’s Instagram page (@britisharmy), depict women who are already serving. In order to interpret the findings it was important to understand how women are stereotyped into roles society deem as typically ‘female’.

It is important to note that Stiehm’s (1988) stereotypical labelling of women in the Army is not only subjective but also unethical. However, Goffman’s (1976) work on gender displays balanced any possible disparity as he suggested that gender is a flexible and fluid notion. With Braun and Clarke’s (2006) guide to thematic analysis, this study aimed to probe the following two inductive themes:

1.       Masculine - those who are taking on a more masculine role or are taking part in a military activity that is stereotypically male      

2.       Feminine - those who take part in more stereotypically female activities

 

Data collection was limited to the British Army’s Instagram page (@britisharmy) after 8^th July 2016 when women were officially allowed access to infantry roles. This period was considered significant as it was expected that more images of women in combat or infantry scenarios would be shared as a promotion of women into these roles.

Findings

Masculine

 

Analysis of images in Instagram (@britisharmy) suggested that images of women are more likely to be depicted in masculine roles (Figure 1). This suggests that the British Army are attempting to break the down the assumptions that women in the military are the weaker sex. By providing the public with images of women taking part in arduous and dangerous activities, the British Army are promoting masculine roles for women.

However, this does not address the common stereotypes that depict women in the Army. Women who hold a more masculine physique in these images may be considered “lesbian”, as Stiehm (1988) noted that this label was linked more towards physical attributes rather than the sexuality of the individual. As some show masculine traits, these women become ‘othered’ by assuming a more male stereotype.

 

Feminine

There are significantly less images in instagram depicting women in the army as feminine (Figure 2), suggesting that the British Army are biased towards using images to portray women in active combat roles. This is contrary to the acknowledged social role of women as homemakers and carers. Indeed, feminine images of women on @britisharmy tend to depict women in healthcare or domestic (eg chefs) roles, suggest that the British Army concur with the idea that women need less physically demanding  roles.

From this study, we can start to understand how masculine pictures of women are used as promotional aids to increase recruitment numbers, particularly into infantry roles. It appears that, following the 2016 policy change to allow females into infantry regiments, the British Army are now targeting women in their recruitment campaigns. However, it could not be concluded that female stereotypes were purposefully used to recruit certain types of women for these infantry roles.

 

Westminster Student Blog Series

We have been posting a series of short vlogs, produced by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media. As this is the final vlog, we would like to thank all the Westminster students for their entries.

Public Sphere in the case of the Women's March on London

Author: Tian

A student of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, Jürgen Habermas wrote The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) to explore the status of public opinion in the practice of representative government in Western Europe.

The feminist critique points out that the ‘public sphere’ has proposed a sphere of educated, rich men, juxtaposed to the private sphere that has been seen as the domain of women, which also excluded gays, lesbians, and ethnicities (Fraser, 1990). The criticism has also suggested that a democratic and multicultural society should based on the plural public arenas (Fuchs, 2014). Habermas agrees that his early account in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in 1962, has neglected proletarian, feminist and other public spheres (Fuchs, 2014).

The recent example would be the success of Women’s March. The US election proved a catalyst for a grassroots movement of women to assert the positive values that the politics of fear denies. The Women’s March was held in order to represent the rights of women and solidarity with participants from the threatened minorities such as Muslim and Mexican citizens and the LGBTQ community. There were hundreds of marches have taken place in the major cities around the world.

The video would criticize the concept of ‘pubic sphere’ from both feminist perspective and the emerging of social media. Discuss how the rise of social networking sites has resulted in public discussions on digital platform.

Reference:

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, (25/26), p.56.

Fuchs, C., (2014). Social media. A critical introduction. London: Sage.

Social media research, ‘personal ethics’, and the Ethics Ecosystem

Gabrielle Samuel: Research Fellow Lancaster University / Research Associate, King’s College London.  Research interests: research ethics, ethical and social issues surrounding innovative biotechnologies; social media ethics; qualitative research.

Gemma Derrick: Lecturer, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University. Research interests: Research evaluation, Qualitative research, Group/committee decision-making. 

Ethics review may seem overly bureaucratic to some, but in this blog we argue that a more researcher-committee collaborative process, rather than a gatekeeper ‘tick-box’ role, may help with navigating the ‘ethics ecosystem’ when using new research tools such as social media (SM) data.

The ethics ecosystem exists as an inter-related membership of academic bodies that, when fully functional, acts to reinforce a high-level of ethical behaviour from researchers, and to guard against academic misconduct.  Specifically, this ethics ecosystem can be described as all the individuals (researchers), organisations (research institutions/research ethics committees (RECs)) and external bodies (publishing houses, funding bodies, professional associations) which promote ethically responsible research behaviour in the academy. Ordinarily, the academy’s ethics ecosystem works well due to a shared understanding of what ethically responsible research behaviour is. However, this system breaks down when new ideas, methods or approaches are introduced to its members, and each player interprets and enforces theses ideals of ethical behaviour differently.  This forces each member to re-examine concepts previously thought to be set in ethical stone.  Such is the case of SM research.

Currently this system is failing SM research

Our research has spoken to members at all levels of the ethics ecosystem; researchers using SM data, research ethics committee members, universities, funding bodies, publishing houses and journal Editors, and we found that members possessed inconsistent understandings of ethics applicable to the use of SM in research.  There were different interpretations of the established ethical notions of consent (should we ask for it? shouldn’t we? when and how should we?) and privacy (how, or even should, SM users’ data be protected, and to what degree?); some members viewed SM data as ‘fair game’, while others were more cautious; and only some shouldered responsibility to protect SM users’ perceived privacy. What was lacking was an overarching understanding reinforced by a larger governance body as a mechanism to fuel a wider, community-led understanding about ethical conduct (and misconduct) towards SM research.

At the research level of the ecosystem, researchers’ were monitoring their own decisions about how best to act ethically. However, when left to their own devices this over-reliance on subjective monitoring of behaviour risks the development of a form of “personal ethics”, which would be different for each researcher within this ecosystem;

Interviewer: Are there any guidelines that you follow in your own research?

Researcher: It’s my guidelines. Everybody has their own definition of ethics…. 

This became dangerous when the acceptability of these decisions were related to how strongly researchers justify them, rather than being dependent on conduct checks and balances available by a wider, community-led ethical understanding of SM research;

You’ve got to develop the sense of what's right…then put that across and make your case’

The differing interpretations of personal ethics dovetailed at the institutional level of the ecosystem, when researchers had to, or chose to submit their research proposal to a REC for consideration. Committee members, as actors in this level of the ecosystem, spoke about their lack of experience in reviewing this type of research simply because so few proposals are submitted (due to the differing researcher interpretations of whether ethical review was required). As such REC judgements of ethical conduct relied heavily on researchers’ justifications of ethical decision-making within the application;

We…sometimes make different decisions even for projects that look pretty similar. It’s how they build up their case doing that particular project 

The same held true for other members of the ethics ecosystem, such as the Journal editors and, by extension, peer-reviewers.

To summarise, what does this wide disagreement around SM research mean for the ethics ecosystem? After all, there is nothing wrong with ethical norms being driven by researchers’ different subjective justifications of their personal ethics a.k.a ethical pluralism. However, for SM research, and similar new research tools, reliance on researchers’ justifications of ethical behaviour can be dangerous as it risks leaving important ethical decisions in limbo, and allows for ethically problematic research to fall between the cracks.

What is needed is more governance within the ethics ecosystem.  Only then can enough checks and balances exist to ensure best practice, promote a shared understanding of SM research ethics, and provide necessary audits to protect against scientific misconduct.

One step towards this is to require researchers to submit for ethics review to provide an extra layer of scrutiny. More importantly, it provides REC members with the tacit knowledge necessary to act as this larger arbitrator of ethical conduct for SM research.