Photo Credit: Miguel Bruna
I think about gender bias a lot, pretty much every single day. Partially because I’m the marketing strategist for the Gender Initiative at XPRIZE and partly because one of my greatest personal missions in life is to inspire harmony between the sexes through art, fashion, and open discourse. Like everything else in life, knowledge about a topic is a huge paradox – the more you learn, the more there is left to learn. But so far, I have come to one conclusion that has blown me away: binary thinking is the basis for the entire structure of modern western society.
I first started learning about the word binary when it’s opposite, non-binary, came into the cultural conversation around gender identity. Even though we automatically associate it with gender conversations, binary simply means relating to a system that has two parts. For example, if it’s not black, it’s white. Rich or poor, strong or weak, tall or short, the list goes on forever and ever. Humans love to make conclusions, fit concepts into boxes neatly tied with a bow, and, most importantly, humans yearn to assign value to both parts of the system.
HOW HISTORY HAS SHAPED BINARY BELIEFS
Historically, most binary systems are synonymous with opposites where typically one is right and the other is wrong, or one is more important or better than the other. This, in essence, is the pitfall of this kind of thinking and naturally has been applied directly to men and women. You could say that man and woman are the very first examples of how binary thinking went wrong – take Adam and Eve.
After they ate the infamous fruit, God said to Eve, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow...and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee’ (Genesis 3:16). John Berger explains in his book, Ways of Seeing, that the woman is blamed and punished by being made subservient to the man. Since then, from the Bible stories to 2020, society has evolved into a binary structure without us even noticing it, with modern advertising perpetuating that same thousand-year-old narrative.
What advertising has done is focus on the dominant part of the binary structure and trivialize the secondary. The magic of advertising is that it can program the brains of an entire society to see, feel, and believe something so deeply that it becomes their truth forever. Top brands like Nike and Lego do that every day in a positive way by inspiring generations of athletes and awakening creativity and imagination through play, respectively. With all of the progress advertising has seen, when it comes to gender we’re still pretty stuck in the past, and it’s because the binary construct of gender that we buy into remains at the forefront. Let’s take a look back in time.
ADS FROM THE FIFTIES
The 1952 Schlitz beer ad is devaluing this housewife by saying that she can’t do the one job that she is supposed to be doing right. This is trivializing the female and mocking her for what society has told her that she represents – just a housewife.
The Oxford ad from 1958 is positioned as being progressive by actually featuring a woman’s needs for a car. The problem is that it is defining a woman’s needs through aesthetics and shopping which only devalues her role. Furthermore, the line down the middle ensures the binary structure is crystal clear.
FAST FORWARD TO TODAY
We’ve come a long way since then. Sixty years have passed, and today we’re at an inflection point in culture where something must change, and the media has responded. Many brands have become gender-neutral and are attempting to target everyone with their messaging. While that approach shows a level of progress for society, it doesn't tackle the value misalignment issue that runs deep. A few examples:
Take this Dollar Shave Club ad from 2016; while it's progressive, it’s missing the mark when it comes to valuing all genders by neutralizing them. It’s saying that gender doesn’t matter which inadvertently erases femininity. If we erase the female, then we’ll never know why being female is valuable, important, and different than being male – we’re just pretending that it doesn’t matter.
In a study by Dr. Theo Lieven in 2014, results showed that masculine and feminine brands have higher equity and preference than gender-neutral brands, regardless of product category (Lieven, figure 1). This means that brands should tell gender specific stories and do so without the marginalizing of the other (as we saw in the fifties). While neutral advertising like this may be welcomed by some, it is harmful to women that enjoy a more feminine experience. Those experiences have already been trivialized up until this point and now, in this 2016 ad, they are just being erased.
Just last year Hasbro put out an ad about highlighting the benefits of boys playing with dolls. While this ad is making a great effort, it’s still presenting a binary structure, but now it has swapped gender roles. Simply putting boys into the position of playing with dolls is not going to change the societal status quo, because we’ve never taught children in general the value of playing with dolls. This directly translates to society having never expressed the value of the female experience on a grand scale.
It’s not about teaching little boys to play with dolls, but rather giving them the choice to identify with any toy they want. Many little boys do indeed want to play with trucks and cars, so instead of telling them to play with another toy, we must teach them why kids that play with other toys are just as important. This could result in a full generation of kids growing up understanding that unpaid work in the home or caring for the elderly is just as valuable as the work of a fireman. When both are valued equally in society, through their differences - we can start to make progress for all genders. Feminism isn’t about all women working outside of the home, feminism is about all women having the choice to spend their time exactly as they choose.
SO HOW DO WE DO THAT?
Big societal change doesn’t happen unless the culture changes. Culture doesn’t change unless people start telling different stories. Stories that will begin to undo centuries of diminishing the female experience. Stories that say gender matters and here’s why. Why would we care about the second part of a binary system if we’ve never heard stories about why it matters?
Recognizing the mindset shift that needs to happen, XPRIZE has focused on telling stories about data, specifically missing data. While female needs have always been alive and well, they haven't been implemented in the design of our world like male needs have and that has created gaps everywhere. Buzzfeed captured this young girl’s experience with the gender disparity that exists in diagnosing autism due to girls having been left out of the research. This oversight is a direct reflection of that binary construct we are all living in, and examples like this exist everywhere. Through the XPRIZE Gender Initiative, we are collecting and implementing missing data in multiple industries so we can start to fill in the gaps.
Advertisers can close the gaps we have in culture by choosing to value and celebrate female experiences as a power instead of a burden. There is one binary structure, for instance, that is older than even Adam and Eve, and we experience it every day – the sun and the moon. Generally speaking, people don’t value the sun more than the moon or vice versa - so, what if we take that approach with our world?
When we can value both parts of a binary system for their differences, then we can widen into the non-binary. Suddenly we are open to the stars and comets and everything else that can broaden our worldview simply because we have learned about its value. Systems are collective stories that we buy into, and we have bought into the binary gender system and it’s value assignments for far too long. So, it’s up to all of us to choose something different - a world where ALL genders are valued and respected for what he/she/they bring to the table.