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Excerpts from: W.H.O. Warns Ads for Women Could Raise Rate of Smoking
 

By ELIZABETH OLSON  NEW YORK TIMES  [05/30/01]

  GENEVA, May 29 — Globally, four times as many men as women are smokers, but aggressive tobacco
marketing and promotion could greatly increase the percentage of women who smoke, the World Health
Organization has warned.

As additional women take up the habit, tobacco-related diseases and deaths will rise dramatically unless
governments act to discourage smoking, the United Nations health agency said in a 217-page report released in
advance of the annual World No-Tobacco Day on Thursday.

The percentage of female smokers in industrialized nations is 15 percent, nearly twice as high as the 8 percent in
developing countries, the report says. That does not take into account the women in India and other countries
who chew tobacco, according to the report, "Women and the Tobacco Epidemic."

Over all, it said, 12 percent of women globally and 48 percent of men are smokers.

By 2025, the percentage of women who smoke will be up to 20 percent in both industrialized and developing
nations, the report estimated, and that would raise the number of women who smoke worldwide, from 187
million to 532 million. Even if those percentages are held down, the absolute number is highly likely to rise, the
study adds, because the number of women in developing countries is forecast to climb, from 2.5 billion to 3.5
billion in 20 years.

The increasing percentage of women who smoke is being driven, in part, by the increased spending power of
women and girls, the report finds, and by the loosening of social and cultural constraints that had inhibited
smoking by women in Muslim countries and in China.

Tobacco companies are exploiting those trends with well-financed "alluring marketing campaigns" aimed at
women, so precise that the color red is often used because "it connotes excitement, passion and strength, wealth
and power" and aids in product recall, the authors of the marketing chapter reported.

Such marketing and promotion "cleverly link the emancipation of women with smoking, using slogans similar to
the ones used in Western countries decades ago, such as, `You've come a long way, baby,' " the W.H.O.
report says

The advertising, the researchers found, enhances smoking's appeal as a means of "attaining maturity, gaining
confidence, being sexually attractive and in control of one's destiny — effectively exploiting the struggle of
women everywhere for equality and women's rights."

The campaigns were found to use images of health, fitness, stress relief, beauty and slenderness reinforced by
tobacco company sponsorship of beauty pageants and sports events like tennis.

The tobacco industry had no comment. It has been opposing bans on public smoking and on tobacco
advertising and promotion that anti- smoking campaigners want to see included in a global treaty to curb
tobacco use.

The World Health Organization backs the treaty, which is being negotiated by its 191 member countries, and
has urged that the findings about women be included.

Any "huge increase in the number of women smokers will have enormous consequences on health, income, the
fetus and the family," predicted Dr. Judith Mackay, an official of the agency's Tobacco Free Initiative.

The agency's director general, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, pointed to Asia, "where, on average, more than 60
percent of men are smokers" that millions of women and children suffer from secondhand smoke. "New
evidence shows that parental smoking contributes to higher rates of sudden infant death syndrome, as well as
asthma, bronchitis, colds."

Pregnant women who chew tobacco or smoke or are exposed to secondhand smoke, have a higher risk of
miscarriages and give birth to low- weight babies prone to infection, the report said. Also, in addition to various
cancers, women smokers risk infertility, delays in conceiving, earlier menopause and lower bone density.