Our words say a lot about us (and it's not always good)

Now this is a powerful campaign.

Adweek recent profiled a campaign for UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, that shows how our words — accessed via auto-completed Google searches — reveal how rampant gender discrimination remains worldwide.

Christopher Hunt, head of art for Ogilvy & Mather Dubai, who created the campaign, said:

“This campaign uses the world's most popular search engine (Google) to show how gender inequality is a worldwide problem. The adverts show the results of genuine searches, highlighting popular opinions across the world wide web.”

The actual Google searches in the ads were performed on September 3, 2013. Ten weeks later, in the U.S., not much has changed.

The ad:

The search today (November 13, 2013):

The ad:

The search today (November 13, 2013):

Adweek points out that "these ads do a stellar job driving home the daunting fact that enough people around the world share these vile opinions that Google has come to expect them."

We can, and must, do better.

In fact, Nicole D'Alonzo of the blog TASTEdaily has taken to re-imagining the campaign with a positive spin and is encouraging others to "join us in rewriting the search." There's even a hashtag: #RewriteTheSearch.

This is great work exposing a very important issue.

Source: Adweek