“This Girl Can” campaign from Sport England
In 2017, discussions around gender and media have reached a
fever pitch. Following a bruising year at the ballot box, fourth-
wave feminism has continued to expand. From the Women’s
March to high-profle sexual harassment trials to the increasing
number of female protagonists gaining audience recognition in
an age of “peak TV,” women are ensuring that their concerns
are heard and represented.
GENDER BIAS IN ADVERTISING2
H&M Autumn collection ad 2016
We’ve seen movements for gender equality in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley—
and even on Madison Avenue. In response to longstanding sexism in
advertising, industry leaders such as Madonna Badger are highlighting how
objectifcation of women in advertising can lead to unconscious biases that
harm women, girls and society as a whole.
Agencies are creating marquee campaigns to support women and girls. The
Always #LikeAGirl campaign, which debuted in 2014, ignited a wave of me-
too “femvertising” campaigns: #GirlsCan from Cover Girl, “This Girl Can”
from Sport England and the UK’s National Lottery, and a spot from H&M that
showcased women in all their diversity, set to “She’s a Lady.” Cannes Lions got
in on the act in 2015, introducing the Glass Lion: The Lion for Change, an award
to honor ad campaigns that address gender inequality or prejudice.
But beyond the marquee case studies, is the advertising industry making
strides toward improving representation of women overall How do we square
the surge in “femvertising” with insights from J. Walter Thompson’s Female
Tribes initiative, which found in 2016 that, according to 85% of women, the
advertising world needs to catch up with the real world
3GENDER BIAS IN ADVERTISING
We’re fnally able to answer these questions with the same
rigorous, data-driven approach that informs so many other
important decisions in advertising.
New joint research from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender
in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University and J. Walter
Thompson New York, funded by Google and developed
at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of
Engineering, analyzed more than 2,000 English-language flms
from the Cannes Lions archive to put numbers to the challenge
of female representation in advertising, and get a sense of
whether the situation is changing.
“Technology advances in data sciences and machine learning give us new
ways of shining light on media content, at scale and with an unprecedented
level of detail and accuracy,” says Shri Narayanan, Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair
in Engineering, University of Southern California. “It can give us novel insights
not just by eliminating the mystery about potential unconscious biases in
content, but in offering objective tools to shape content.”
TECHNOLOGY REVEALING BIAS
Or, in the words of Caroline Heldman, research adviser to the Geena Davis
Institute and associate professor in the politics department at Occidental
College, “more data means more light is shed on the problem, which inspires
more activism around the issue.”
“Gender Bias in Advertising” emerges from earlier work by the Geena Davis
Institute to create a tool to analyze gender representation in entertainment
media. The Geena Davis Institute partnered with the Signal Analysis and
Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) at USC and with funding from Google to
create the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (GD-IQ), which Heldman describes as “a
computer engineering tool that is able to automatically analyze the screen time
and speaking time of characters in video down to the millisecond.” Heldman says
it’s the only software in existence specifcally developed to collectively analyze
gender, screen time and speaking time in media and entertainment content.
Apart from automating the task of counting faces and voices, the GD-IQ is
able to mark times with much greater precision than human researchers
can achieve. “There’s infnite possibility,” says Madeline Di Nonno, CEO of the
Geena Davis Institute. “We’re excited because it allows us to reveal a level of
unconscious bias that isn’t possible with the human eye, and it’s able to go
much deeper.
GENDER BIAS IN ADVERTISING4。