Misrepresentation of Women: Recognizing and Addressing Biases in Media and Literature

Think about the last film you watched, the last novel you read, or the last news bulletin you followed. How were women portrayed? Were they complex individuals with dreams, flaws, and agency – or were they reduced to familiar roles: the devoted wife, the helpless victim, the glamorous sidekick? This gap between how women actually live and how they are depicted in media and literature is what we call misrepresentation. It is not always loud or obvious. Often, it works quietly – shaping attitudes, reinforcing biases, and narrowing the possibilities that society imagines for half its population.

What is misrepresentation of women? 🔗

Misrepresentation refers to the inaccurate, incomplete, or distorted portrayal of women’s lives, experiences, and capabilities across media and literature. It goes beyond showing women in a negative light. It includes depicting them through a lens that fails to reflect their true diversity, strength, and complexity. When a film consistently casts women only as love interests, when a news report focuses on a female politician’s clothing rather than her policy positions, or when a textbook ignores the contributions of women scientists – all of these are forms of misrepresentation.

The issue is deeply systemic. Media scholars have noted that media culture provides audiences with standardised ideals of femininity and masculinity, establishing what it supposedly means to be male or female. When these ideals are rooted in patriarchal norms, they create a narrow, often damaging framework for how women are perceived.

Common forms of misrepresentation 🔗

Stereotypical role confinement 🔗

One of the most widespread forms of misrepresentation is confining women to a handful of predictable roles. In television serials, films, and even literature, women frequently appear as homemakers, caregivers, damsels in distress, or passive recipients of male attention. Their identities revolve around a man – a husband, a father, a lover – rather than around their own ambitions and journeys.

Consider the typical Bollywood formula where a highly educated female character abandons her career after marriage, implying that a woman’s professional goals should always yield to family responsibilities. This does not reflect the reality of millions of women who successfully navigate both personal and professional lives every day. A content analysis published in Media Asia found that fictionalized television dramas overwhelmingly portrayed men as decisive and career-oriented, while women were depicted as emotionally dependent and eager to please.

Objectification and sexualisation 🔗

Another pervasive form of misrepresentation is reducing women to their physical appearance. Advertisements routinely use close-up shots of women’s body parts to sell products that have nothing to do with those bodies – from deodorants and cars to chocolates and mobile phones. The “item song” phenomenon in cinema, where a woman appears in a brief, heavily sexualised dance sequence unrelated to the storyline, is a particularly stark example. These sequences literally treat women as “items” – decorative objects inserted for male entertainment, stripped of character and narrative purpose.

This is not a minor issue. The Geena Davis Institute’s 2024 Film Study analysed 82 family films and found that female characters comprised only about 37.8% of all characters on screen. The institute has long recommended that the industry reduce objectification and focus on creating well-rounded characters valued for nuanced traits rather than physical appearance.

The “victim” narrative 🔗

News media often frames women primarily as victims – of violence, of circumstance, of tradition. While reporting on violence against women is essential, the consistent absence of stories about women’s achievements, leadership, and resilience creates a lopsided narrative. A Newslaundry study conducted in collaboration with UN Women revealed that less than 8% of total news coverage revolved around gender-related issues. Even when women featured in news segments, they were often presented as beneficiaries of welfare schemes or as victims, rarely as agents of change.

This coverage tends to be episodic rather than sustained. A high-profile case might dominate headlines for a few weeks and then disappear entirely, without follow-up reporting or meaningful policy discussion. This pattern trivialises women’s issues and prevents the kind of sustained public discourse that leads to real change.

Silencing and erasure in literature 🔗

Misrepresentation in literature has an even longer history. For centuries, the literary canon was shaped almost entirely by male authors and critics. Women writers were either excluded or forced to publish under male pseudonyms – think of the Brontë sisters writing as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, or Mary Ann Evans adopting the pen name George Eliot. Virginia Woolf’s landmark 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own powerfully demonstrated how women’s material and intellectual deprivation created barriers to authorship, illustrating her argument with the imagined fate of a fictional sister of Shakespeare.

Even when women do appear in classic literature, they are frequently written through a male gaze – valued for beauty or virtue, punished for independence or desire. Feminist literary critics have long argued that such portrayals both reflected and reinforced the patriarchal norms of their time, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of misrepresentation that shaped readers’ expectations for generations.

Why does misrepresentation persist? 🔗

Underrepresentation behind the scenes 🔗

One of the key drivers of misrepresentation is the lack of women in decision-making positions within media and publishing. When editorial rooms, writing teams, and production houses are dominated by men, the stories they tell inevitably reflect a limited perspective. Research from Indian newsrooms shows that women hold only about 15% of leadership positions across news organisations. They write roughly 25% of articles in English-language outlets and just 17% in Hindi publications. With such imbalanced representation behind the camera and on the editorial desk, it is no surprise that the content produced often fails to capture the diversity of women’s experiences.

Commercial incentives and stereotypes 🔗

There is also a deeply entrenched belief in the media industry that stereotypes sell. Producers and advertisers often assume that audiences prefer familiar tropes – the dutiful wife, the vamp, the self-sacrificing mother – over complex, realistic portrayals. This creates a self-fulfilling cycle: stereotypical content is produced because it is considered commercially safe, and its commercial success then justifies the continued use of the same stereotypes. Breaking this cycle requires not just creative courage but also evidence that audiences actively seek more nuanced content.

Cultural conditioning 🔗

Misrepresentation does not exist in a vacuum. It both reflects and reinforces the cultural norms of a society. In many communities, traditional gender roles are deeply ingrained – so deeply that even well-intentioned content creators may not recognise their own biases. When a novelist automatically writes a female character as gentle and nurturing without questioning why, or when a news editor assigns entertainment and lifestyle beats to women reporters while men cover politics and finance, these are expressions of internalised cultural conditioning that perpetuate misrepresentation.

The real-world impact of misrepresentation 🔗

Shaping self-perception 🔗

Media and literature are powerful socialising agents, especially for young people. When girls consistently see women depicted in limited roles, it affects how they perceive their own possibilities. If every story tells a girl that her primary purpose is to be beautiful, supportive, and accommodating, it becomes harder for her to imagine herself as a scientist, a CEO, or a political leader. The Geena Davis Institute has championed the idea that “if she can see it, she can be it” – a simple principle that underscores how crucial accurate representation is for expanding aspirations.

Normalising inequality 🔗

Repeated exposure to stereotypical content normalises the underlying inequality. When audiences see women constantly depicted as secondary to men, it reinforces the belief that this is the natural order of things. Research suggests that exposure to objectifying media content can increase tolerance for sexual harassment and gender-based violence. This is not a theoretical concern – it has practical consequences for how women are treated in workplaces, public spaces, and homes.

Policy and public discourse 🔗

Misrepresentation also affects how society responds to women’s issues at a structural level. When media coverage of gender-based violence is sensational rather than analytical, it reduces complex social problems to individual tragedies, discouraging systemic policy responses. When textbooks erase women’s contributions from history, it diminishes the perceived importance of gender equity in governance and development. The way women are represented shapes the way policymakers, voters, and citizens think about gender – and this has direct implications for legislation, resource allocation, and institutional priorities.

Addressing misrepresentation: what can be done? 🔗

Building media literacy 🔗

The first step toward addressing misrepresentation is learning to recognise it. Media literacy – the ability to critically analyse the messages embedded in films, advertisements, news reports, and books – is a vital skill for both consumers and creators of content. Asking simple questions can be revealing: Does this female character have her own goals and motivations? Is she as fully developed as the male characters? Does the story pass the Bechdel Test – that is, does it feature at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man? These are not just academic exercises; they are practical tools for becoming more discerning consumers of media.

Amplifying women’s voices in creation 🔗

Increasing the number of women in positions of creative and editorial authority is essential. Female directors, writers, producers, and journalists bring perspectives that are often missing from mainstream content. Films like Queen, Lipstick Under My Burkha, and The Great Indian Kitchen demonstrated that stories told from women’s perspectives – stories that depict women as complete human beings with agency and complexity – can resonate powerfully with audiences. Supporting and promoting women creators is not just an equity issue; it directly improves the quality and authenticity of the content produced.

Legal and institutional frameworks 🔗

Legislation like the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986 addresses obscene portrayal, but it does not adequately cover the more subtle forms of misrepresentation – stereotyping, trivialisation, and erasure. International frameworks like the Beijing Declaration have recognised gender stereotyping in media as a violation of women’s dignity and a driver of gender-based violence. Strengthening domestic legal provisions to address these subtler but equally damaging forms of misrepresentation would be a significant step forward.

Feminist literary criticism as a corrective lens 🔗

In the academic sphere, feminist literary criticism has played a crucial role in exposing and challenging the patriarchal biases embedded in the literary canon. Scholars like Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar have worked to rediscover overlooked women writers, reinterpret classic texts through a gendered lens, and expand the definition of what counts as important literature. This critical tradition has real-world implications: it reshapes curricula, influences what students read, and gradually transforms the cultural understanding of whose stories matter.

Conscious content creation and consumption 🔗

Change is not solely the responsibility of institutions. Individuals – as readers, viewers, parents, and educators – have the power to challenge misrepresentation through their choices. Supporting books, films, and media created by women and featuring authentic female characters sends a clear market signal. Discussing gender portrayals with children helps them develop a critical eye from an early age. Advocating for diverse reading lists in schools and colleges ensures that the next generation encounters a broader, more truthful range of human experiences.

Moving toward authentic representation 🔗

Authentic representation does not mean showing women only in a positive light. It means showing them as full, complex human beings – capable of strength and vulnerability, ambition and tenderness, success and failure. It means telling stories that reflect the enormous diversity of women’s lives across regions, classes, castes, religions, and identities. A rural woman entrepreneur, a Dalit activist, a transgender woman navigating the legal system, a young girl debating a career in astrophysics – all of these stories deserve space in our media and literature.

The shift from misrepresentation to authentic representation is not just a matter of fairness. It is a matter of accuracy. A society that sees only a fraction of its women’s experiences reflected back to it is a society working with an incomplete picture of itself. And you cannot build a just and inclusive society on the foundation of incomplete truths.

What do you think? How have the portrayals of women in media and literature shaped your own perceptions of what women can achieve? And when you encounter a stereotypical or reductive portrayal of a woman in a film, book, or news report, what questions do you find yourself asking – or wish more people would ask?

References

1. https://www.abacademies.org/articles/exploring-gender-stereotyping-as-a-dimension-of-indecent-representation-of-women-in-indian-media-12673.html
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12342718/
3. https://geenadavisinstitute.org/research/gdi-film-study-2024-representation-in-family-films/
4. https://skchildrenfoundation.org/representation-of-women-in-indian-media/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_literary_criticism
6. https://ilkogretim-online.org/index.php/pub/article/download/7843/7510/14937
7. https://geenadavisinstitute.org/
8. https://geenadavisinstitute.org/representation-in-family-films-2024-study-by-geena-davis-institute/
9. https://literariness.org/2022/10/07/feminist-literary-criticism/