Have you seen this ad campaign from UN Women? It uses real Google searches—ones where when you type in words and it fills in popular searches to save you time—to demonstrate that sexism’s nowhere near dead. (This one’s for you, person who complains that feminists are whining about nothing!) Hey, what are people searching for that begins with “Women shouldn’t…”? According to the ads, they often finish that sentence with “have rights,” “vote,” or “work.”
The ad campaign is really effective messaging, especially with those big, beautiful photographs, and their goal is just to start conversations, to make the case that there’s more work to to be done when it comes to fighting sexism globally. But surely they must’ve been edited, I thought. And doesn’t Google know you a little bit as a user, maybe take your search history or your profile into account? I mean, shit, if I type “Women should…” into Google, if it has any computer-brain at all, it should fill in “destroy the patriarchy,” “make more art out of menstrual blood,” or something like that.
Nope. I get this:
Wow.
As if that’s not enough, try looking at results for both men and women. Cienna was looking at this same story, and yelled across the office: “Jesus, try it with ‘men.'” So I did.
Here’s “women need to“:
And “men need to“:
Thanks, humanity. Thanks a whole lot.
(And thanks, Slog Tipper Rob.)