Today marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, causing a flurry of comments and articles about how far women have really come on the issue of equality. Unfortunately I’m flat out with ECF2011 planning to give this day proper attention and a blog post that it deserves but I couldn’t let it pass by without a quick one, particularly having posted previously on the issue.
Although Action Aid UK have a greatly title ‘GetLippy‘ campaign doing the rounds, the one that caught my eye today was the launch (?) of the new coalition campaign called ‘EQUALS‘.
“EQUALS is a partnership of leading charities that have come together to step-up the call to demand a more equal world” – a little arbitrary perhaps but certainly there’s some great campaigns behind it (including my previous charity 1GOAL) so I’m looking forward to seeing it develop, not least for this interesting video featuring Daniel Craig (as James Bond) cross-dressing and Judi Dench doing the voiceover:
What was most interesting though was the facebook interaction they featured on the site (see midway down the page). Unfortunately it was a little confusing, particularly given that so much seemed to have gone into creating some great graphics, the information portrayed by them is pretty unclear – and I’m a big fan of infographics! The application (accessed via facebook connect) pulls, relatively basic, information of your friends’ and then places it into what seem like fairly standard comparisons. The statistic about the number of women raped in England and Wales each year is undoubtedly shocking (85,000) but it is the first that appears as you scroll down the page – an interesting one to present first given that it is seemingly unrelated to the information just provided via facebook so although it seems to feature pixelated images of your friends, the connection is unclear.
There then follows some basic comparisons of men & women without much-needed clarification and a ranking of countries where my friends live. This has the most ‘information/explanation’ displayed underneath but I’m still left confused at what exactly it’s trying to tell me. Maybe I’m just having one of those days (quite possibly!) or maybe it’s not quite been fully user-journey tested so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt but I’m keen to know what I’m supposed to be seeing revealed here:
At the very bottom of this page is the most interesting or rather interactive section (and relevant to needing to connect via facebook) where it pulls out some statistics about there being more MPs pre-2010 election named David than women MPs, showing a photo of a friend of mine named David asking if he was one of them. (I wonder if they chose this ‘cos David is a relatively common name although wonder what they do if people don’t have a friend called David…) Then there was a section about how 22% of FTSE100 companies don’t have women on their board and pulling another image of a friend of mine who works for a FTSE100 company – clever use of what’s available on facebook without being too invasive – but I wonder why these two most interesting stats were right down the bottom of the page?
Would love to hear your thoughts…
Check out www.weareequals.org