You've come a long way, baby, but you haven't yet arrived

The current state of marketing to women has a vibe that harkens back to the print ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes that ran through the 1970s and 80s with the tagline, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The backgrounds were a representation of the bad old days of restrictions on women that contrasted with the confidently posed model holding her slim cigarette.

The bad old days for marketing featured blatantly sexist ads in which women aspired to nothing more than pleasing their husbands or on catching a husband by being pretty and ladylike. We have moved on, but not altogether.

Marketers have become aware of the need to move with the time and have adapted ad images accordingly. The way women are represented in ads is no longer limited to airbrushed models who exhibit the “right” figure, skin tone, hair, and age.

While ad imagery has come a long way, surveys of women indicate that marketing still has a long way to go.


Only 29% of American women believe advertising portrays them accurately is the title of Callie Schweitzer’s LinkedIn article posted on March 9, 2021. The statistic comes from Morning Consult. Even men weren’t fully convinced, as less than half (44%) said they considered women’s representation accurate.

That's not exactly passing marks.

A flame-broiled fiasco on International Women’s Day 2021

You don’t have to look hard for the brand that seriously misread the room in issuing a Tweet in honor of International Women’s Day, and the Internet made sure you knew about it even after the Tweet was deleted.



The extremely provocative-sounding declaration was meant to reference support for women who become professional chefs and its project called HER (helping equalize restaurants). But without that immediate context provided only within the print ad that you can see below, there was the apparently sexist declaration alone, and that boomeranged against the brand.



The backlash was so strong, that the account had to offer the combination of an apology and reason for deleting the tweet.



Burger King fell right into that marketing hole that Schweitzer complained about with an assertion that “perpetuates centuries-old cultural stereotypes of what society ‘expects’ women to be.” It should be obvious that marketers should steer clear of marketing to women in such forms. But it is still trickier for them to identify what women do want to see and hear in marketing.

Read more in What Women Want to See in Ads