The Autocomplete Truth

The agency, Ogilvy and Mather recently used the Google Search Autocomplete function in an advertisement campaign for UN Women to reveal how much prejudice and discrimination against women and gender equality persist. The campaign posters have close-up shots of women's faces with autocomplete results for terms like "Women shouldn't…" and "Women need to…" placed over their mouths, as if to silence their voices. 

Actual Google searches for “women should” were auto-completed with “stay at home,” “be slaves,” “be in the kitchen” and “not speak in church.” Searches that began with “women shouldn’t” were auto-completed with “have rights,” “vote,” “work” and “box.” This just means that a huge number of internet users have used these phrases in their search queries- a reminder that sexist attitudes still exist today and it is quite disappointing. Men and women have differences, and I believe that sexist attitudes still exist today because some people can't learn to adapt to the differences. As a result, they criticize the other sex for being different. Also, whenever there are differences; disagreements, tension, and problems will arise. 


Sexist attitudes like this can definitely affect women in many ways. It can affect our feelings and attitudes toward men. It can affect our jobs and our daily lives. Sexist attitudes and discrimination towards women is also one of the main causes of violence against women. It does not only affect women, but also our society. Sexism divides people and causes problems.


At this day and age, sexism should not exist anymore. We must always remember that we are all EQUAL. Since the Auto-Complete Truth campaign was a success, there should be more campaigns like this to bring awareness about this issue.  If people do not have knowledge of an issue they cannot do anything to change it. The Auto-Complete Truth campaign was truly enlightening. It brought mindfulness to perceptions that people were unaware of.