A few weeks ago, UN women released a series of ads exposing the prevalent views on women. The 4 ads were photographs of women with Google search autocomplete of various phrases placed over their mouth.
Speaking from hours of procrastination experience, the autocomplete on Google can provide often, albeit highly peculiar, funny insights into the popular searches or queries people make on the Internet. The tool of autocomplete has been offered by Google since 2008 and works by algorithms that find the most common searches of a word of phrase depending on the region you are searching from and the language you are using to search, and sometimes uses your own personal internet history to personalise your autocompletes.
However UN Women used phrases such as “Women should…” “Women shouldn’t…” “Women need to…” “Women cannot…” in New York on the 9th of March 2013, of which the most popular searches display the entrenched sexism. A few of the most infuriating results included “Women need to be put in their place” and “Women should be slaves”. And when compared to those phrases with “women” replaced by “men” the differences are ever the more clearer.
Since UN Women released this advertisement, UN Free & Equal drew inspiration from their campaign and have done a similar thing, replacing “women” with “gay” which gave results to even darker and aggressive Google autocomplete suggestions, one top result being “Gays need to be put to death”.
Although the political and social status for women and the gay society has improved over the last century, and especially in the last few decades, it’s evidently clear that attitudes still remain fixed on the traditional mindsets of the pre-modern era.
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