Ads said to violate gender equality

TALLINN - Estonian women’s rights activists turned to the Consumer Protection Board with a complaint over an advertisement that promotes the use of pork, reports EPL Online. The Estonian Women’s Studies and Resource Center estimates that the advertisement in question deepens gender stereotypes and is based on an outdated gender roles concept.

The campaign, organized by the Estonian Food Association titled “Sealiha, healiha” (Pork is good meat), includes a number of large posters displayed on outdoor media. One of them states: “What to do in order to get the husband to come home straight from work? Cook him pork. It tastes good!”
The Estonian Women’s Studies and Resource Center submitted on June 9 a complaint over this advertisement to the Consumer Protection Board. “According to this advertisement, it is the role of men to have jobs and to earn money and the women’s task is to be housewives and take care of men’s needs,” explained the representative of the organization, Kadri Aavik. “In our opinion, the advertisement deepens gender stereotypes and is based on an outdated gender roles concept,” she added.

Among other arguments, the women’s rights activists referred in their complaint to the Advertising Act, which states that advertisements are not to violate the gender equality principle as stated in the Gender Equality Act, undermine one of the genders nor depict one of the genders as dominating or submissive.
The Estonian Women’s Studies and Resource Center aims to have the advertisements removed. “We also wish to draw attention to those making advertisements (and commissioning them) as well as that of the public to the fact that gender stereotypes in advertisements will help to increase gender inequality in the society, which has an adverse impact on the lives of women as well as of men,” stated Aavik.

The Consumer Protection Board has up to 30 days to respond to the complaint.