I saw a Facebook post from a friend of mine who is appalled to find out that one of the main sources of business advertisement in Chicago, called Only Ads, has an official policy to only include photos of men. I never realized that this was an official policy of the publication, but I do remember wondering why my husband’s relative decided to represent herself in her ads resembling a Minecraft avatar. Now I know.
The reason why discovering this policy is unsettling is that many of the advertisers in this publication, and certainly, many of those on their mailing list, belong to communities where excluding images of women is frowned upon. In fact, perhaps as a backlash against the growing trend of “female-free” public images in the more ultra-orthodox communities, some organizations and schools pointedly include positive images of women and girls engaging in communal activities or being honored at banquets.
Adults and children alike are bombarded with negative images of women in the general media. Both women and young girls are visually sexualized in order to sell clothing, music, food, toys, beauty products, you name it. The answer isn’t to go the polar opposite and hide half of the population away, the answer is to counter those images with positive role models and positive peer models both for the girls and women in the orthodox community, and also for the boys and men who can see their mothers, wives, sisters, teachers, and neighbors achieving success in business, torah learning, chesed, and any other number of positive activities that are part of the real fabric of daily orthodox life.
It goes without saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Whether you are looking for a lawyer, a realtor, a therapist, a dentist, a doctor, a wig stylist, a makeup artist, or any other type of service – seeing the face of the person you might be working with can have an impact on deciding to do business with them.
A business relationship is similar to a shidduch. If you are browsing a dating website, how likely would you be to skip over the profiles with no photo, as opposed to the profiles that do have a picture attached? Likewise, it makes sense to feel that you have more information about the lawyer whose ad features a photo of his face, as opposed to the lawyer whose ad only features her firm’s logo.
This puts 50% of the Only Ads business advertisers at a competitive disadvantage when using the Only Ads platform to reach their desired market, yet I’m willing to bet that female advertisers pay the same rates as their male competitors and counterparts, who are allowed to share more visual information about themselves, thus better engaging the trust of the consumer.
The decision not to include female images for Only Ads is a financial one. The publication determined that more of its readership doesn’t want images of women, than does want images of women. I’m not sure how they came by their statistics, but often publications that decide to exclude photos of women from their pages do so for monetary reasons, and not necessarily because they personally hold the conviction that it’s forbidden. I can’t say whether or not the publishers of Only Ads are personally offended by images of women; the only thing that is certain is that the publication feels it would lose too many eyeballs and advertising dollars if they included female images.
The nice thing about Chicago is that there are other options. For example, The Chicago Jewish Advertiser (disclaimer – I have no relationship to the publication other than being on their mailing list) provides the same service as Only Ads, and they give fair photo representation to both males and females.
These are a few pages from the Chicago Jewish Advertiser April 2016 issue, as an example –
One of the things that you will notice is that there are still advertisements in the Chicago Jewish Advertiser publicizing women owned businesses that don’t show photos of the business owner herself, nor female models who might logically be photographed showcasing jewelry, clothing, or makeup services. Again, the decision to include photos or not, even for the advertiser, is a financial one.
On the one hand, a simple black and white, or two color text ad, is cheaper to create and run in print than a multicolored ad with photos. This is true regardless of the publication you choose to advertise in. Running an advertisement without a photo could simply be a cost effective way of publicizing your business.
On the other hand, if you are a small business, and you want to use the same ad in all of the local advertising venues, you most likely don’t have the budget to hire an artist to create different ad designs for the same campaign. You will likely pay to create one advertising layout to run in each publication, and that means creating one ad that conforms to the Only Ads restriction of not showing female images, even if you would otherwise have included photos. Thus, even in publications that don’t have such restrictions, Chicago area business women are still penalized and limited by the Only Ads “no female photo” requirement if they only have the budget to create one ad.
I think the sense of outrage that some folks expressed on Facebook is a reaction to the growing “scope creep” of ultra-orthodox standards being foisted upon the modern orthodox community. The only answer for objectors is to patronize businesses and services that have more egalitarian policies, or create new venues where men and women alike can promote their services to the fullest extent.
