Equal Measures 2030

Gender Equality is good for all of us, women, men, everyone.

I was brought up in a pretty traditional baby boomer household. Dad went to work, Mom stayed home and took care of us kids. I watched the Equal Rights Movement and the Equal Rights Amendment of the 1970's on the TV without really understanding what it meant. We were a liberal family and Dad supported equal rights for women in theory, but not really at home. Dinner had to be ready when he got home and I don't remember him lifting a finger to clean dishes, do laundry, or vacuum the floors. He made the money and she did the housework.

The gender roles you grow up with shape how you interact in the world and you often don't even realize how much the rest of society reinforces your gender expectations. Women would be stereotyped on TV, in magazines, on billboards, and in movies and it felt completely normal. Our society surrounds women with images, themes, and values that objectify them, diminish their value, and reinforce male dominance; and social media amplifies that today. Sounds pretty serious and maybe even dubious until you think about addressing this topic yourself and put your gender lens on.

Fortunately, information can change human behavior and my behavior on Gender Equality has been changing for some time. But it changed more dramatically when I started to look at it seriously the last 6 weeks.

On Thursday, I gave a short keynote presentation on Gender Equality at a US Chamber of Commerce hosted event at KPMG offices in NYC. The event was designed to showcase the data innovations of a great group called Equal Measures 2030. Ten minutes isn't much time to give a presentation and you have to be precise. I don't think my short speech was particularly noteworthy, but what I learned about Gender Equality in preparation for the speech is and that's what I'd like to share with you.

Companies have used the most deplorable messages in product advertising. These messages tell girls from the earliest ages that they are subservient to men. I heard a statistic last week that the self confidence of girls peak at the age of 10, which must be about the age they start reading magazines.

You might say that these are all pretty old, probably from the 1950's to 1970's.

That's true, but a recent magazine ad from Nikon demonstrates that the images and messages are still pretty biased against women. The language isn't as overtly offensive, but the messages are still quite offensive. This summer, Nikon announced a new full frame camera the D850, which looks like an amazing camera. I'm a photographer and follow photographic forums on gear like the new Nikon. Nikon announced an advertising campaign that featured 32 prominent photographers, all of which are men. This caught the attention of many in social media and the company was appropriately criticized for not including women in the campaign. Nikon reacted by defensively saying they had invited women to participate but none agreed, as if to say, "we couldn't find any qualified women photographers."

This might have been believable if social media hadn't revealed that women photographers hadn't been invited. And a quick look online at the kinds of Ads that Nikon uses to promote its cameras doesn't reveal much sensitivity to gender equality.

The high end camera market is a market in decline thanks to advances in smartphone cameras. Nikon seems happy to cater to male photographers as a demographic and their camera sales demographics show the success of this approach. Camera sales seem to indicate that women photographers prefer smaller cameras and men larger ones. Still, if this is the demographics of their sales it is hard to understand how sexist ads like this one help Nikon sell small cameras to women.

The photography world is full of exploitive images of women. Social media creates really powerful incentives to take the most exploitive photos of women possible to gain large numbers of followers and likes on sites like 500px. That site is full of member galleries devoted to photos of nude and semi-nude women in color and black and white, but you won't find many similar photos of men in the same positions.

Some might say that the human body is beautiful and it is. And photography is an art and art is about pushing boundaries. But sexism isn't a boundary that needs to be pushed anymore. Gender Equality is the new boundary and I'm waiting for the brave new photographers to start photographing women coding at computers in Palo Alto, working on solar projects in Myanmar, laying paving stones on European streets, driving cars in Saudi Arabia, and leading companies in Latin America.

We are all facing limits to growth today. Over consumption and over population are threatening our planet and all it's ecosystems. We can't solve the challenges of today and the future with old-fashioned sexist attitudes, images, stereotypes, and biases because we need every person in the world to reach their fullest potential.

We men have a job to do. We have to support and promote women at work, in school, in politics, and in all parts of society. We have teach our sons to respect and support girls and women. And we have to stand up to bias when we see it and hold our companies, business partners, and customers accountable.

Gender discrimination happens every day. Women are surrounded by images, audio, video, text, and human interactions that re-enforce gender bias and few of those incidents are recorded. I urge Equal Measures 2030 to begin documenting the incidents of gender bias in society - historically and contemporaneously - because everyone can change their future behavior with more information.

In addition to content and stories about gender discrimination and bias I hope EQ2030 also documents and tells the stories of all the amazing women all over the world who are overcoming obstacles to become leaders in their families, communities, cities, nations, and the world. We all need positive examples of gender equality to balance the bias and demonstrate a future in which all of us can reach our fullest potential.

Finally, we have to put on our Gender Equality lens on when we design Machine Learning solutions because those programs depend on consuming vast amounts of structured and unstructured content that is full of gender, racial, religious, and ethinc bias and those biases will teach computers to learn the wrong lessons.

This is what I learned preparing for this presentation, mostly from the great community here on linkedin. I hope this post inspires you to look deeper into these issues and add your views to the comments.

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