Working hard or hardly working : career-related magazine headlines and their relation to anxiety in female readers

Abstract

Career‐related headlines are making their way on to the covers of prominent women's magazines. Publications such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour are working to devote more cover space to the many sub-categories of the working world: pay raises, in-office relationships, achieving success and more. With this change, comes the necessity of understanding how readers interact with and are affected by the headlines. Because research on appearance‐related headlines has proven to cause a number of negative responses in women, such as anxiety, it was important to understand if career‐related headlines would do the same. 12 women between the ages of 20 and 29 were interviewed and asked questions based on two lists of headlines from the two magazines listed above, spanning the past three years, as well as a number of corresponding articles. What emerged was an understanding that career‐related articles can, in fact, produce the same negative responses as those researched before them, though actual action is debatable. The continued purchasing, despite these negative emotions, helps further explain the function of the sociocultural theory in our society and the continued success of the magazine industry.