In December, the ‘End Violence against Women Coalition’ will vote for who it deems to have been the ‘sexist of the year’. Whether or not one agrees with last year’s specific selection of Robin Thicke for what were argued to be the sexually violent lyrics of Blurred Lines, an emphasis on how women are represented in the media is crucial to furthering gender equality, not only in connection to physical and emotional abuse, but also to advance the interests and opportunities of women in the workplace.

One might argue that focusing on figures like Thicke is trivial, and that matters such as the Blurred Lines controversy are ‘soft’ compared to the ‘hard’ reality of women being denied equal wages and employment opportunities. But regardless of whether one deems ‘Blurred Lines’ in particular to be sexist or not, a focus on media representation is crucial and inextricably linked to tackling the broader social problems of economic opportunity.

Of course, advancing female interests in the economic sphere is fundamental for gender equality, and the facts support the need to focus on this: the full-time gender pay gap in the UK is 10 per cent while, for part-time work, it is 34.5 per cent. 70 per cent of those on the national minimum wage are women, while women make up only 17 per cent of board members of FTSE 100 companies.

But, overcoming these economic inequalities through ‘redistribution’, as feminist thinker Nancy Fraser terms it, can only be achieved in combination with a focus on the cultural sphere and representing women in way that compliments the concern with employment. If women are portrayed in a demeaning, objectified or overly sexualised manner then society’s conceptualisation will be detracted from seeing women as equals, and the prospect of women gaining top positions in FTSE 100 companies or Parliament will be less. This is not say that women shouldn’t be presented in a sexual way at all, of course, given that beauty and attraction are so fundamental to human life, but just that women shouldn’t be presented in this way to a significantly greater extent than men, and particularly not by forms of media controlled largely by men.

When The Sun newspaper produces page spreads of topless women on Page 3 for men to sit back and admire, femininity is reduced to the purely sexual realm and becomes something that men can objectify through physical features alone. This influences notions present in society about what it means to be a woman, affecting the attitudes of those responsible for judgements made in the economic sphere - for instance over wages or promotions. Page 3 may be a particularly crude example and one that only influences certain readers of the Sun, but the overly sexualised portrayal of women is present in magazines and music videos everywhere. The explicit version of the Blurred Lines video is one example of a larger culture.

Economic policies of redistribution must be accompanied by efforts to equalise gender representation in public culture. Social welfare programmes benefiting single mothers will only be supported by the public if single mothers are not portrayed as sexually irresponsible scroungers living as parasites off the state. Public campaigns which oppose Page 3 and aim to change certain media representations of women are vital to challenging demeaning conceptions of femininity, while Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism campaign brings to attention the grassroots action that can help alter embedded attitudes and stereotypes.

But, what feminism must be careful of in shifting the focus from the overly sexual is not to constrain the choices of women, and not to instruct individuals as to what they must do in order to free themselves from the chains of male oppression. Criticising certain aspects of public culture and promoting the idea of a more rational femininity should not ever become an order for women to follow a single pathway to freedom, or a demand for women not to take their tops off for a magazine. The lines between freedom and authority really would become blurred in such a circumstance. Similarly in the economic sphere, though the barriers to gaining positions in top businesses or Parliament should be dissembled, women should not be discouraged from staying at home to look after children if that is what they wish to do. Individuality and diversity must be feminism’s goal rather than homogenisation.

The explicit version of Robin Thicke’s music video is part of a broader popular culture that presents women in an overly sexualised manner in comparison to men, and harms attempts to improve the situation of women in the workplace. Some may scoff at the ‘soft’ nature of such debates, but the ‘hard’ economic progress wished for will only be successful in combination with an analysis of the cultural.