Where Are the Women?
';While many companies are criticized for their portrayal of women in their advertisements and brochures, furniture giant IKEA is being criticized for something else: not portraying enough of them.
Swedish home furnishings giant IKEA is promising to depict more women in its instruction manuals after Norway’s prime minister accused it of showing only men assembling furniture.“IKEA will now review its instructions leaflets to get a more even balance between men and women,” IKEA said in a statement on Thursday. The privately owned group has 208 stores in 32 countries.IKEA said it already used pictures of women in its leaflets alongside men and cartoon figures whose sex is left unclear.
Needless to say, the critics aren’t placated by androgynous cartoon characters. But nice try.
While this might be the result of the chauvenistic belief that men are the ones who assemble furniture (while the women patiently stand by, beer in one hand, and freshly baked muffins in the other), the President of Norway has another explanation.
Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik earlier criticised IKEA for failing to depict women and linked it to an apparent fear of upsetting some Muslims.“This isn’t good enough,” he was quoted as telling the Norwegian daily Verdens Gang. “It’s important to promote attitudes for sexual equality, not least in Muslim nations.”
And we wouldn’t want to do that.
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An Australian immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave has been blogging since early 2003.
March 14th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Give me a break. I mean I’m a feminist, but lets be honest here, I can put together a kinder egg toy. I shall never forget when I bought my bed, from IKEA, actually. My first year of university. Ex boyfriend gone, father deceased, brother abroad. My flatmate was a girl. We had no idea what to do. The instructions might has well have been in Chinese. We tried for hours. We nearly sabotaged the parts. All we could say was WHY don’t we have a MAN here?? Then I reached the conclusion (somehow), that the parts didn’t fit together, and that I needed a saw. Luckily, there happened to be a carpenter working on the roof that day. I didn’t know him at all. I went and asked him if he could lend me a saw, since I was “trying to assemble a bed”. I saw the look of despair in my eyes, and said he’d come have a look. He ended up putting the whole thing together for me. The following year I tried to put a deskchair together. Even that turned out to be too complicated. I’m not an imbecile. I’ve written excellent essays in several languages. But furniture? Forget it, it’s a man’s job, whether the president of Norway likes it or not.