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Journal of Business Communication, Vol. 35, No. 2, 246-263 (1998)
DOI: 10.1177/002194369803500204
© 1998 Association for Business Communication

The Visual Portrayal of Women in IBM's Think: A Longitudinal Analysis

Shirley Kuiper

The University of South Carolina, Columbia

Rosemary Booth

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Charles D. Bodkin

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Magazines such as Working Mother and Business Week regularly publish lists of woman-friendly companies. The compiler of one such list asks to see the com pany's newsletter as an indicator of how a company treats its people. An analysis of photographs for 2 two-year periods (January 1985 through December 1986 and January 1991 through December 1992) showed that women were not portrayed equitably in IBM's employee newsletter Think.

Compared to their presence in IBM's labor force, women were significantly underrepresented in photographs, both in 1985-86 and 1991-92. Although women constituted approximately 29% of IBM's workforce, only 23% of the 820 subjects of the coded pictures were females. Moreover, although women were pictured more frequently in 1991-92 than in 1985-86, the mean proportion of women in Think photos did not increase significantly.

Women's portrayal as leaders (17.4%) did not differ significantly from the proportion of IBM managerial positions (20.0%) held by women, and the propor tion remained stable over time. However, a large percentage of small-group photographs portrayed no clear leader, male or female. This fact was attributed to IBM's tendency to downplay managers in the magazine sent to all employees.


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