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femmes pour Getty Images

What’s a “woman” in 2007 and 2017?

Article originally published September 2017

The New York Times compared the most purchased photo for the term “woman” in 2007 and 2017 on the Getty Images photography agency website. I was ready to take in some bad news and no, I was happily surprised.

When we talk about women and technology, it’s rarely to deliver good news. The story of the Google manifesto is still fresh in my mind – a Google employee wrote an article, for internal circulation, explaining the disparities between men and women within the company by “biological differences”. But this time, it’s actually good news.

For the record, the New York Times published an article on the Getty Images site, which is also a subscription-based image bank. The service is widely used by news sites and blogs.

We’re talking about thousands of photos purchased by hundreds of sites around the world. The photos purchased reflect current trends. A sort of portrait of our society.

In 2007, the most downloaded photo shows a woman who appears to be naked, lying in bed with a sheet over her and her face clearly visible. In 2017, it’s a woman hiking in Banff, alone and fully clothed. We can’t see what she looks like.

How has such a change taken place in 10 years? It’s thanks to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In collection.

Sheryl Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook. She is an outspoken feminist and has published a book, Lean In, which has been a worldwide success. She campaigns for the place of women in the professional world, and in technology in particular.

So she created a collection of photos with Getty Images to better reflect our society. Her slogan: “You can’t be what you don’t see”. We see fathers playing with their children, women scientists, women athletes, in professional settings and so on.

Photos of working women are nothing new. What is new is seeing photos of women working while sweating or getting dirty.

Good news in techno is rare enough to warrant a mention. By making available to the media and other sites a collection of photos of women of our time, we’ve managed to reflect a desire that was clearly there: women don’t need to be sexualized and objectified to be women.

Does this mean that having 50% women in STEM (science, technology, computer science, mathematics) is enough to have 50% female employees in tech companies? That’s a shortcut I won’t make, knowing full well that the famous pipeline problem isn’t one. The latter was an important topic in its own right, and I’ll talk about it in a future column.

Getty Images by the numbers in 2017

  • Global searches for “female protest” quadrupled
  • Searches for “female coding” tripled
  • Searches for “female CEO” increased by 47%

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