Gender Representation and Stereotyping in Popular Magazines

Introduction

For my Language investigation I will be exploring the representation of gender in women’s and men’s magazines and how the language use is different to appeal to or converge with the ways both genders differ in language use and what they stereotypically should be concerned about, for example men are strong and powerful whilst women are stereotyped as concerned with beauty and health.  I have chosen to do gender because that is the aspect of the English language course that interests me most. I will be exploring the idea that men’s and women’s magazines use gender stereotypes that appeal to the male or female ideal.
I hope to be able to use the ideas of default assumptions and gender scripts in my analysis, and apply gender theorists such as Tannen. 
I will be using Men’s Health magazine and Women’s Health magazine because they are published by the same company [Hearst magazines] and they have the same demographic audience with the exception of gender. This makes the non-gender related differences as narrow as possible making it a fairer representation.

Hypotheses
Within these Magazines I expect to find that:
>Men’s magazines use language that reinforces men’s need to express themselves as strong and masculine. Whilst women’s magazines play on the stereotype that women feel the need to focus on being attractive and slim.
>Men’s magazines use more aggressive language than emotive, whilst women’s magazines use language that is more emotive (Reinforcing Tannen’s difference theory, specifically that of information vs. feelings.) Men’s magazines use more dynamic verbs than women’s and women’s use more stative verbs to show emotion.
>Women’s magazines use more adjectives than men’s magazines.
>Women’s magazines use language that is supportive to the readers and encouraging whereas men’s magazines use language that is more competitive.
>Women’s health uses more modal verbs to soften what they are trying to express, compared to Men’s Health.

Methodology 
I have chosen Men’s’ Health magazine and Women’s Health magazine because they clearly are directed at a strictly male or female audience; they also have similar content which is varied from health to food to fitness etc. they are both projected to the same demographic audience with the exception of gender. I am going to use the autumn 2012 issue of Women’s health and the September 2012 issue of Men’s health.
I am going to use the contents page from each magazine. This will give me a clear representation of what articles or areas the magazine is using to aim at its audience, I can also analyse the use of dynamic and stative verbs. I will also use one article from each magazine that is similar in content or meaning and analyse this. 
I am going to analyse various word choices within my data to try and prove or disprove my hypothesis. I am also going to analyse the data by using quantitative analysis of verbs [stative and dynamic, also modal] and adjectives to assess frequency of content within the texts. I will do further qualitative analysis on the text and analyse the representation of gender, I will look for default assumptions and gender scripts, and how i can apply theorists such as Tannen.
Once I have my data I will use various forms of visual representation such as graphs to help me illustrate my findings. I will also analysis the language use In depth under headings such as ‘use of dynamic verbs’, ‘use of stative verbs’, ‘use of modal verbs’, ‘use of adjectives’, ‘default assumptions and gender script’ etc.