UN Women, a branch from the UN that concentrates on women’s issues has recently released an ad campaign showing searches made about women through Google’s search engine. What’s shocking to me is that this isn’t just one of a few searches that come up within Google, that people have pasted together in order to create an unsettling campaign. These are actually the top recommendations that pop when one types in: “women shouldn’t” or “women need to” into the search bar.

I feel that this ad campaigns shows a lot of what’s overlooked in society. Many people seem to be apathetic towards gender equality now that women have gained some sort of equality in terms of voting rights or rights within the workplace – leaving the greater issues to be dealt with by the ones who are actually affected by it. In a world that’s supposed to be fighting for equal rights for men and women, it’s astonishing that a globally used search engine can turn up such abhorrent search results. It’s deeply disturbing to me that somewhere in the world, someone is actually typing in those words – whether to find clarification or justification.

This ad campaign also shows that gender equality is not something that we are even close to achieving. Once again, as mentioned in my previous post, the success of this ad campaign comes down to taking something simple and piecing it together in a way that actually speaks to it’s observers. How many of us would go into the search bar with these prompts in mind? It would have been another issue that slipped our minds simply because it would have never crossed our everyday lives. The UN Women have achieved the impact they knew they would from releasing this ad campaign because it hits a chord within everyone – people who are affected by gender inequality; people who didn’t know the extent of gender inequality in present society; people who are apathetic to gender equality.
It would be a cliché to say that this campaign brings about awareness, but that’s exactly what it does – in the best and most direct way possible. It’s visible, relatable and to the point. The fact that these searches are conducted on Google, which almost everyone has access to and can experience firsthand the inequalities conveyed by these searches amplifies the affects of this campaign.

Once in a while, we see advertisements like this and realize that there are so many issues that go unaddressed and generally ignored by society because it’s not clearly observable. Once in a while, we see advertisements like this and realize that we’re much further from accomplishing the goals that we’ve set as a society than we really thought.

Sources

• http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/10/18/new-ad-campaign-uses-popular-search-terms-to-show-how-the-world-really-feels-about-women/
• http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2013/10/un-campaign-uses-google-autocomplete-to-highlight-gender-inequality.html