IIIT Hyderabad Research Highlights How Visual Gaze Objectifies Women Irrespective of Their Attire

IIITH's recent study using cognitive science theories reveals that sexual objectification and harassment extend to women in non-sexualized attire, challenging the notion that revealing clothing is primarily responsible. Know details here

Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad researchers, funded by DST’s Cognitive Science Research Initiative, have revealed in a study presented at the Cognitive Science Society (CSS) conference 2024 in Rotterdam how women are objectified even when dressed in non-sexualized attire. The paper, titled "Objectifying Gaze: An Empirical Study With Non-Sexualised Images," was authored by Ayushi Agrawal and Srija Bhupathiraju under the guidance of Prof. Kavita Vemuri of the Cognitive Science Lab at IIITH. The study uses eye-tracking technology and well-known cognitive science theories to examine visual gaze patterns.

What Are You Looking At?

According to the researchers, while revealing attire is often held accountable for sexual objectification (SO) and harassment, gaze objectification extends to women in even non-sexualized attire. “Regardless of attire, a woman is subjected to a very intrusive gaze in a public or any other space for that matter,” says Kavita, adding that they started on that premise and wanted to test it out. Similar studies conducted in the West have concluded that sexualised images of women attract attention. “It could be any outfit that reveals a lot of skin such as swim wear and they found that the gaze is on the sexual body parts rather than on the face,” she says.

The IIITH team on the other hand experimented with images of men and women dressed in a pair of jeans and a shirt. “We did toy with the idea of using salwar-kurtas and/or saris but since the most casual attire that is commonplace these days is the pant-shirt combo, we went ahead with the latter,” explains Ayushi.

Social Experiment

Participants, who self-identified as male or female, were shown a series of images featuring both men and women while their visual gaze was tracked using heat maps. The study analysed key metrics, including total fixation duration - the time spent looking at specific areas of interest, such as the face or sexual body parts and visit count, which measures the frequency of revisits to these areas. A notable difference emerged when comparing the objectifying gaze in Western and Indian contexts. While Western studies typically show a gaze focused more on sexual body parts than on the face, the IIITH study found that the gaze in the Indian context was directed toward both sexual body parts and the face.

“The Indian population still places a lot of importance on facial features. The evaluation of attractiveness and other social information is all extracted from the face,” explains Kavita. This intriguing finding, where individuals in non-sexual attire were still gaze objectified, suggests that gaze objectification occurs regardless of attire and may be influenced by the social information we first gather from the face.

Incidentally, this was found independent of participants’ gender. “It means that both male and female participants were found to be visually objectifying women. When a female objectifies another female, it may mean one of two things,” says Ayushi. “One is self-objectification, internalising socio-cultural attitudes and the second is a social evaluation”. The male gaze on a woman’s body parts is a process of reducing her to an ‘object’ of desire. It has to be noted that male participants also self-objectify as revealed from the study.

When males objectify females, they dehumanise them by reducing them to mere body parts and often times such objectification is a factor in a sexual assault. The broader issue is that numerous factors beyond female attire influence how we perceive, objectify, and mistreat or physically abuse a female. These factors include toxic masculinity, power, social biases and stereotypes, impaired judgement and reduced inhibitions due to substance abuse, pornography, media portrayals of women, and various hormonal or clinical conditions among others.

The researchers mention that each of these requires detailed studies in the context of the Indian population and larger multi-disciplinary teams working together to develop solutions that drive social-change based on scientific evidence. As a step towards this, in an extension to this study, apart from various kinds of attire, and the impact of the profession of the females on visual gaze, Ayushi is also examining social stereotypes, toxic masculinity, gender role fixation, the role of social media including sexualised item songs, and the brain activity associated with the empathy felt for rape victims.

“This study was done on a socially aware college-going crowd. If the sample was obtained from a more diverse public, the statistical weights would have been more significant,” says Kavita. While conceding that this research is just the tip of the iceberg and in no way answering all questions, the researchers point out that it’s imperative to analyse all factors that influence the way we perceive others. “The bigger question then is whether these perceptions – of how we look at people – change our empathy. For example, would you have more empathy for a victim of assault who is in a salwar-kurta versus someone in a mini-dress?”

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