Social Campaign

The Autocomplete Truth

In today’s age, it is almost unthinkable to consider gender inequality as a persisting issue. The UN Women organisation, however, sees that, despite decades of global advancement, discrimination against women is still rampant worldwide. In order to lay this bare for a global audience, a conversation everyone thought was resolved was reignited. Using Google’s autocomplete function, fed by six billion searches daily, a mirror was held up to the world to expose the hidden truth. The shocking results became the faces of the campaign, in which women of different cultural backgrounds were shown having this familiar Google input field stuck over their mouth like a gag to shut them up. Placing the striking campaign hashtag #womenshould centre stage sparked a global discussion on gender equality as it invited people to debate the topic on social media, TV shows, radio, blogs, PR summits and in classrooms worldwide. Thus, the campaign managed to put the issue of gender equality back on the global agenda, paving the way for real change.

Statement by the Jury

That the shocking truth of gender inequality, which this campaign aims to communicate, is reaffirmed to such blatant effect by the Google autocomplete function, is highly bewildering, as the text input field literally gag the women shown, thus visually expressing and augmenting the impact of the issue. Without too many words, the campaign thus draws attention to a widespread problem in a poignant, simple yet intelligent manner – getting to and affecting viewers emotionally.

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