The Female Gaze Is Not a Niche: Why It's Better Brand Strategy

The industry keeps framing female creative leadership as a diversity initiative. That framing is both wrong and expensive.

Before we get to the business case, it's worth understanding the concept of The Female Gaze properly. Because it gets misused constantly.

Where The Female Gaze Came From

To understand the female gaze, you have to start with the male gaze, which is where the entire conversation originates. (Yeah we did groan a bit writing that)

British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey first articulated the concept in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey argued that sexual inequality functions as a controlling social force in cinematic representation.

In plain terms: Hollywood cinema was built on a set of visual conventions that assumed the viewer was a heterosexual man, and constructed women onscreen accordingly. Women were objects to be looked at. Men were agents who drove the story. Mainstream cinema catered to male viewers, presenting women as passive objects and men as active subjects driving the narrative.

This wasn't just a theory about film. In advertising, objectification and sexualised portrayals of the female body were found even in situations where sex had nothing to do with the product being advertised. The logic of the male gaze migrated wholesale from cinema into commercial image-making.

What the Female Gaze Actually Is

Here is where people get confused. The female gaze is not simply the opposite of the male gaze. It is not "women looking at men." It is not a political stance bolted onto a campaign. It’s not an aesthetic shorthand for soft lighting and emotional moments.

Unlike the male gaze, the female gaze lacks a singular foundational text and has evolved through critiques in feminist scholarship. It is a set of tendencies, not a formula.

The most useful practical framework came from filmmaker Joey Soloway at a 2016 TIFF masterclass. Soloway outlined three key concepts: "feeling seeing," "the gazed gaze," and "returning the gaze." In film and media, feeling seeing refers to a process of filmmaking that makes the camera subjective. The gazed gaze creates the perspective of being "in" rather than overlooking a character's experiences, allowing the audience to understand the character's inner thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Returning the gaze involves switching the roles between the audience and the subject.

Soloway described the female gaze as "an empathy generator that says I was there in that room... it uses the frame to share and evoke a feeling of being in feeling, rather than seeing. The emotions are being prioritised over the action."

Crucially, the female gaze is not gender-specific in terms of who can execute it. It is about representing women as subjects with agency. People of any gender can create work with a female gaze. What defines it is the perspective and what it prioritises, not the biology of the person behind the camera.

Contemporary filmmakers like Céline Sciamma in "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" (2019) and Chloé Zhao in "Nomadland" (2020) have been studied as examples of directors constructing alternative visual regimes rooted in embodiment, reciprocity, and realism. In Sciamma's work in particular, the gaze becomes a site of creative reciprocity rather than hierarchical power. Looking is dialogic rather than possessive.

That distinction matters enormously for advertising. Dialogic rather than possessive. It is the difference between content that speaks to an audience and content that performs at them

What This Produces in Commercial Work

When the female gaze is properly resourced in advertising, the results are measurable. Here are the clearest examples.

Always: "Like a Girl" (2014)

A P&G and Millward Brown study found that 76% of young women aged 16 to 24 said the campaign changed how they viewed the phrase "like a girl," so it was no longer an insult.

76% of young men said they would now think twice before using it negatively!

Always swept six Effie Awards in 2015, including four Gold, and P&G was named Most Effective Marketer in North America that year. The brand did not win because it was brave. It won because it understood its audience in a way that a team disconnected from that lived experience almost certainly would not have.

Bodyform / Libresse: "Womb Stories" (2020)

Bodyform had already replaced blue liquid with real depictions of menstrual blood in "Blood Normal," and celebrated female anatomy in "Viva La Vulva." With "Womb Stories," the brand went further: covering IVF, endometriosis, menopause, miscarriage, and first periods.

The campaign was created by a predominantly female team at AMV BBDO and Framestore. Producer Niamh O'Donohoe noted that having that team gave them a shorthand that made the storytelling more honest: "We could easily communicate what we needed because there was a mutual understanding of how these stories had to be presented." The campaign won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Craft Lions, a Gold Lion in Branded Content, and a Silver Lion in Direction.

This is what the female gaze looks like operationally in a production environment. It is not a mood board. It is who is in the room during the brief, during the shoot, during the edit, and what they are willing to say out loud.

Nike: "Dream Crazier" (2019)

The 90-second spot narrated by Serena Williams generated nearly 6 million YouTube views and 28.4 million Twitter views within days of its Oscars debut. 

More than a third of consumers said they liked brands more when their marketing challenged gender stereotypes. Nike did not stumble into this. It was a deliberate strategic choice built on knowing what its female audience actually wanted to see reflected back.

The Numbers Behind the Argument

Women drive more than 80% of purchasing decisions. Yet only around 12.6% of creative director positions are held by women and 1% of creative agencies are owned and run by women. That gap is not a pipeline problem. It is a strategy problem. You are building for an audience you are systematically excluding from the room where the work gets made.

Research shows that campaigns developed by diverse teams are 25% more effective. Not 25% more socially conscious. More effective, as in: performs better, converts better, earns more trust.

These are not soft metrics. They are purchase intent indicators.

The Argument the Industry Keeps Avoiding

Industry voices have noted that brands treating Women's Day and Mother's Day as cues to speak about women rarely move beyond caregiving as a frame. The framing fails because it is built by people who see women as a category to address, not an audience to understand.

That is the precise difference the female gaze names. It is the difference between a creative team that has heard about women's experience and one that has lived it. The decisions those two teams make, at brief stage, at casting, at edit, in the room when someone says "is this right?", those decisions diverge.

At Be The Fox, this is not a values statement we include at the bottom of a pitch. It is the method. It’s part of the reason we’re spearheading an initiative called ‘Be The Frame’ - a pact to report on and analyse the genre diversity across all our projects from above and below the line.

Female-led creative teams notice different things. They catch different failure modes. They build for audiences who have historically been built at, not built for.

The question isn't whether diverse creative leadership is good for culture. It is. The question the industry has been too polite to ask is: why are you leaving the performance upside behind?

Niche is what you call something when you haven't looked at the numbers. The female gaze is not niche. It is sharper focus.

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