NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, SeeHer, the leading global movement to eliminate gender bias in media and advertising, and Getty Images (NYSE: GETY), a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace, released their 2022 Imagery Toolkit for Inclusive Visual Telling: Women to help marketers understand the importance of imagery selections and help eliminate one-size-fits-all representation. The toolkit puts women and girls front and center, giving marketers the tools they need to showcase women as multifaceted, multi-dimensional beings.
Getty Images, a member of the SeeHer movement, first partnered with the organization for their 2020 Inclusive Visual Storytelling Guide for Women, thanks to their joint mission of changing the way women are portrayed in marketing and advertising. The companies adapted the initial guide, released in 2020, to create their latest iteration, a more robust toolkit featuring additional learnings, insights, and solutions for marketers, as well as updated data and research by SeeHer and Getty Images’ VisualGPS.
According to research conducted by SeeHer, nearly 60 percent of advertisements still show women in stereotypical roles, while one in four women say that there is not enough variety in women’s gender identities depicted on screen. Additionally, Getty Images’ proprietary VisualGPS research found that 53 percent of American women experience discrimination or bias because of more than one aspect of their identities, with Black and Indigenous women and women of color (BIPOC) being 5 times more likely than white women to experience discrimination. The research also showed that white women are more likely to be depicted in popular visuals than women of color, though most of the world is not white.
“We continue to see the advertising and entertainment communities evolve how they portray women and girls,” said Christine Guilfoyle, President, SeeHer, Association of National Advertisers. “The new guide encompasses new learning and will help companies fully understand the business incentive in accurately depicting women in advertising.”
This updated edition takes an intersectional approach, aiming to showcase the multiple identities women simultaneously hold and displaying how these traits overlap and intersect with the hope that marketers can leverage it to seamlessly create unbiased, effective advertising that leads to measurable impact.
“While we’ve seen brands continue to ramp up necessary changes in the way they represent women, there is still more work to be done,” said Tristen Norman, head of Creative Insights for the Americas at Getty Images. “This revised edition takes a more nuanced approach, pulling in certain impacts we’ve seen on women as a result of a global pandemic, as well as emphasizing the importance of intersectionality, all with the aim to encourage more diverse, nuanced imagery of women in advertising in ways that reflect the current state of the world.
The Inclusive Visual Guidebook helps brands with the data, insights and questions to take immediate action in their visual choices to help drive change. More can be found here.
The updated 2022 guide encourages marketers to:
- Highlight women in a variety of nonstereotypical roles and settings to all gender identities and expressions.
- Show women across racial backgrounds and highlight the nuanced ethnic identities that speak to their cultural upbringings.
- Showcase lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in scenarios outside of pride celebrations and romantic relationships.
- Provide a more honest reflection of the active lives that women lead, and the changes they make over their lifetimes by showing different kinds of relationships, activities, and ambitions for women of all ages.
- Depict the day-to-day lives of people with a variety of disabilities, from cognitive disabilities to deafness to arthritis. Show women and girls with disabilities living full lives, through story-first visuals.
- Depict women of all body types in visual storytelling and embrace women of all kinds, across racial back- grounds, ages, skin tones, and abilities.
- Avoid religious stereotypes and show women of different religions in a variety of contexts—including ones that don’t overtly depict religious objects or environments.
- Show women across social classes with empathetic, honest imagery. Reflect class in details, like styles.
ABOUT SEEHER
SeeHer is the leading global movement of media, marketing and entertainment leaders committed to the accurate depiction of women and girls in advertising and media. Launched in 2016 by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in partnership with The Female Quotient (The FQ), SeeHer is changing how women are portrayed in media. To help members benchmark success, SeeHer spearheaded the development of the Gender Equality Measure® (GEM®), the first research methodology that quantifies gender bias in ads and programming. GEM® proves that content accurately portraying women and girls dramatically increases both purchase intent and brand reputation. The GEM® methodology quickly became the industry standard, winning the prestigious ESOMAR Research Effectiveness Award in 2017 and leading to its global rollout in 2018. Since 2019, the movement has expanded its verticals to include sports (SeeHer In Sports) and music (SeeHer Hear Her).
To learn more, visit SeeHer.com and follow SeeHer on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter.
ABOUT GETTY IMAGES
Getty Images is a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace that offers a full range of content solutions to meet the needs of any customer around the globe, no matter their size. Through its Getty Images, iStock and Unsplash brands, websites and APIs, Getty Images serves customers in almost every country in the world and is the first-place people turn to discover, purchase and share powerful visual content from the world’s best photographers and videographers. Getty Images works with over 496,000 contributors and more than 300 content partners to deliver this powerful and comprehensive content. Each year Getty Images covers more than 160,000 news, sport and entertainment events providing depth and breadth of coverage that is unmatched. Getty Images maintains one of the largest and best privately-owned photographic archives in the world with millions of images dating back to the beginning of photography.
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