April Martin and Elizabeth Warden, undergraduate students in the School of History, Technology, and Society, have been invited to attend the ACCIAC Meeting of the Minds to be held in early April. The conference gathers 5-10 outstanding undergraduate researchers, along with their faculty advisors, from each ACC university to present their original research.

April Martin will present her paper "Too Big a Storm: The Complicated Atmosphere around Women's Sexual Problems," which examines the framing and medicalization of women's sexuality. Based on a content analysis of articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today in the past 15 years, Martin found that the media's presentation of women's sexual problems is both complex and contradictory, possibly resulting in a resistance to medicalization by the public and FDA.

In a similar vein, Elizabeth Warden will present “The Power to Keep Them Apart”: The Reinforcement of Gender Stereotypes in Prescription Direct-To-Consumer Advertising," which addresses the internalization of gender norms through a content analysis of prescription product advertisements in the highly gendered magazines Cosmopolitan and Popular Mechanics. Characteristics found to differ in accordance with the intended audience by gender were settings, color schemes, word choice, and character activities.