A comparison of gender role portrayals in magazine advertisements from Germany, Poland and the United States Malgorzata Skorek University of California, Merced Margrit Schreier Jacobs University Bremen ICA 2009 Abstract This study investigates the presence of different types of gender roles (working and nonworking, functional, and dominance ) in 1861 advertisements coming from Ger- man, Polish and American magazines from three genres (general interest, womens, mens magazines) published in 2007. A primary contribution of the paper is the cross-cultural comparison and the inclusion of two European countries in which gender roles in magazine advertising have not been studied previously. Moreover, we include roles studied by other researchers in the past, which allows us to cover a broad variety of different types of roles portrayed in magazines from the studied countries and genres and enables a comparison of our results with previous studies. All sampled ads were content analyzed and comparisons between genders were carried out separately for each genre in every country by chi-square analysis. Our main results suggest that women and men are shown in different roles in magazine advertising. In particular, women are by comparison to men heavily un- derrepresented in recreational and family roles in most of the magazines analyzed. The most common nonworking roles for both men and women are decorative and actors are mostly presented in a symbolic association with the product. As far as dominance is concerned, equality between the genders is the most frequently found relationship in ads from all magazine genres. The data for American general interest magazines showed that the trends from the seventies were reversed; recreational and working roles are no longer dominant in the general interest titles, and the portrayal of traditional roles has given up to equality ads. Finally, we have found a clear standardization of the portrayed gender roles across magazine genres in all studied countries and very few similarities across differ- ent genres within individual countries. This result suggests that each genre portrays a unique set of gender roles. Hence, the collapsing of genres as it has been common in previous research may have hidden some underlying differences in gender roles between genres.