{"id":27685,"date":"2019-08-30T18:22:28","date_gmt":"2019-08-30T22:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urelles.com\/whats-a-woman-in-2007-and-2017\/"},"modified":"2025-03-25T13:04:28","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T17:04:28","slug":"whats-a-woman-in-2007-and-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.urelles.com\/en\/magazine\/inclusion-en\/whats-a-woman-in-2007-and-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s a \u201cwoman\u201d in 2007 and 2017?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Article originally published September 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New York Times compared the most purchased photo for the term \u201cwoman\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cbiological differences\u201d. But this time, it’s actually good news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the record, the New York Times<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How has such a change taken place in 10 years? It’s thanks to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

So she created a collection of photos with Getty Images to better reflect our society. Her slogan: \u201cYou can’t be what you don’t see\u201d. We see fathers playing with their children, women scientists, women athletes, in professional settings and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photos of working women are nothing new. What is new is seeing photos of women working while sweating or getting dirty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getty Images by the numbers in 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n