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- This came up when I looked for “sexism.” Seems legit!
If you never met a woman and were trying to figure out what we’re like purely from looking at stock photos, you’d think most of us were salad loving, mostly naked, power suit-wearing idiots. Thankfully, Jessica Bennett and her team at Lean In are partnering with Getty Images to combat this insipid form of institutional sexism and make stock images less sexist.
Born out of the memoir of the same name by Facebook’s chief operating officer, the non-profit has partnered with Getty Images to create a stock-photo library of 2,500 pictures that portray women in a positive light. Those will be available to Getty customers like corporations seeking an image for their website, creative directors at ad agencies and photo editors at media outlets.
And:
The notion behind the partnership is that a sizable share of results that come up in routine stock-photo queries for terms like “businesswoman” and “career woman” are “completely sexualized or just really cheesy,” said Jessica Bennett, Lean In’s contributing editor who works on editorial partnerships for the organization.
She pointed to photos of women in boxing gloves and women gleefully ascending ladders in their high heels, a trend that New York Magazine recently documented.
“There’s so much terrible stock imagery out there, so we wanted to put something out that felt really authentic and empowering,” she said.
It will be nice to look up “feminism” on a stock photo site and not see a woman threatening a man with a gun or an iron anymore.