Gender in Pop Culture

            After a brief scroll through the ‘News’ app on my iPhone, I found an interesting article that immediately caught my attention. It’s titled “Rejoice: Image Searches Just Became More Gender-Balanced” and written by Semcon and published by Chicagoist on December 2, 2016.

            Basically this article is about a new “open source software” called “Re-Search” made by Swedish company, Semcon. What this new search engine does is gender balances searched internet images. For example, if you were to go on Google and search “engineer” you would get thousands of images of a man in a hard hat holding blue prints, looking very intrigued at his work. This gender unbalance goes the other way too, for example, if you sear “teacher” you would get mostly of images of a woman in front of a blackboard. This of course, isn’t fair, and Semcon is working to fix the problem.

            What I think is very interesting is that I’m sure most of us, including myself, never though that this was even an issue. We all probably just searched things on Google Images and never batted an eye as to the gender gap there was, even though we would hear about it all the time in the news. It was just one of those things that went right over our heads. But now that I am aware of it, it does make a me a bit angry. When I was younger, there was some road construction going on by my house, and the team working on the road was all women. There had been a sign put up that said “Men At Work”. The first day they were there, my mom and I drove by and saw one of the crew members duct taping “Women At Work” on to the sign. That’s something that’s stuck with me for a long time, and a small event in my life that I really looked up to ever since that day. So when I found this article about this gender imbalance on the internet, that I had never thought about, I was very excited, even if I wasn’t worried about it before. I especially liked the part of the article that included the ‘flip side’ to this problem as well.

            I think it’s a wonderful opportunity, Semcon is doing more than what they need to by closing the gender gap. Something as simple as this, can cause a big impact. Just image a 10-year-old using Google images to research a career project for school, and all they find is pictures of men in that field. This way, children can be taught too, at a young age, that you truly can be anything you want to be.

Works Cited Page

Semcon. “Rejoice: Image Searches Just Became More Gender-Balanced”. Chicagoist. 2 December, 2016. Accessed 6 December, 2016. http://chicagoist.com/2016/12/02/rejoice_image_searches_just_became.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-nFP4PKaW4