IIntroduction
　　Sexism, which is defined as 'sets of attitudes and behaviors towards people that judge or belittle them on the basis of their gender, or that perpetuate stereotypical assumptions about gender roles' 1, can be discovered in every sector of society although under different guises as unfair recruitment practices and unequal pay, and has existed through the culture and history of humankind. Although since the feminism movement of the 1960s, many legislations, such as the Equal Pay Act (1970) and the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), have been enforced, the real situation is not optimistic for women as a whole since statistics show that '93 out of 100 university professors are men; 96 out of 100 general surgeon; 96 out of 100 company directors' (Walter, 1998). The reason for this inequality in the workplace is not because women are less intelligent than men. Among many contributing reasons for the inequality, the most important two are the traditional ideologies towards women, which claim that women are inferior, subordinate, belonging to a secondary class, only suitable for housework; and the physical differences between women and men, resulting in their different responsibilities to the society, for example, some duties and jobs particularly involved in giving birth to children. Therefore, filled with traditional views upon women and the differences between women and men, most employers do treat women differently from men in recruitment practices and employ more or only male colleagues. However they do not admit sex discrimination by arguing that they select employees according to the same criteria listed in their recruitment advert in which there are no explicit words saying only male workers will be recruited. It is this argumentation that interests the author to analyze the recruitment advert of 'Michael Page' in 'Financial World'2 which is one of the most famous journals in the business world to discover whether there is sexism in the advert. In this paper, by analyzing the field, tenor, and mode of the register of the advert of 'Michael Page', The author attempts to examine whether and how male readers are exclusively positioned to raise critical gender awareness of female readers so that true equality between men and women can be eventually realized in the world.
　　II Literature Review
　　Register is defined as "a configuration of meanings that are typically associated with a particular situational configuration of field, tenor, and mode, which must include the expressions, the lexico-grammatical and phonological features that typically accompany or realize these meanings" (Halliday and Hasan, 1985).
　　Halliday et al (1964) define field as the way "registers are classified according to the nature of the whole event of which the language activity forms a part". Gregory and Carroll (1978) clarify the definition as: "Field of discourse is the consequence of the user's purposive role, what the user's language is about, what experience the user is verbalizing, what is going on through language". Therefore to analyze the field of the advert is about to answer these questions respectively.
Gregory and Carroll (1978) define tenor as the "relationship the user has with the audience", which means the social relations between the speakers/writers and the listeners/readers involved in certain communications. When communicating with different social individuals or groups, the users usually choose different language of different scales of formality, politeness and impersonality. Therefore the tenor can be identified accordingly.
　　Halliday (1964) initially defines mode as "the medium or mode of the language activity". He (1985) later explains the definition as "the symbolic organization of the text, the status that it has, and its function in the context, including the channel". Mode considers the effect of the physical distance on language use, along with the choices it provides, and the limitations it imposes, which is the focus of the later analysis.
　　III Findings and discussion
　　3.1 The first impression of the advertisement
　　The 'Michael Page' recruiting advert appeared in 'Financial World' in April 2003. 'Michael Page' is an international recruitment consultancy firm, specializing in placing candidates in permanent, contract, temporary and interim positions with clients around the world. The advert can be divided into two parts with black and white background. The black one, which has two subparts: to the left side is three line text displaying the website and the names of 16 countries, to the right side is two line text reading 'Michael Page' and 'FINANCE', is at the bottom of the advert, nearly one tenth of the white one. Obviously, the white part is the main body of the advert, thus becomes the target of the analysis. It consists of a title, a text and four pictures. Except the title 'A story that may just change your career', the text and pictures are presented in a page of a book, easily divided and read in two columns. The above two pictures are separated by texts, the left, a red open switch and the right, a man's right hand holding an opening wallet with cards and paper currency as his left hand grasping some money, while two below are nearby with each other, the left, a green map of UK in which 'MANCHESTER' is marked, and the right, the handclasp of two male persons. A word and three phrases of the text are emphasized, the first word 'I' printed in red, occupying three lines, and 'Executive Recruitment Consultants', 'Manchester region', and 'excellent salary and benefits package' written in bold. 'Manchester region' is obviously correlated with the map of UK, whilst 'excellent salary and benefits package' with the man's hands holding the wallet. Therefore, at the first sight of this recruiting advert, the narrator ('I') and the potential 'Executive Recruitment Consultants' of 'Manchester region' ('you') are likely expected to be men suggested by these four pictures. The visual information presented by the first impression thus put forward the assumption that there seems to be sexism in the recruitment advert of 'Machael Page'. The advert has to some extent positioned such a male reader that it prevents a female reader from being its potential reader, which implies that the firm, 'Machael Page', will probably only hire men rather than women for the posts. To find if the text gives us the same implication as the pictures and the ways by which the assumption is confirmed or disconfirmed, I will later scrutinize the text of the advert in detail. (责任编辑：南粤论文中心)转贴于南粤论文中心: http://www.nylw.net(代写代发论文_毕业论文带写_广州职称论文代发_广州论文网）