What is #WomenShould?(old post)

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The "Women Should" movement was an ad campaign started by the organization UN Women due to appalling Google autocomplete results which would be added if the phrase "woman should" was entered in the search bar. When I first saw the campaign I was shocked and in disbelief that people would search these phrases; I had never seen any autocomplete results so taboo. Who would search these queries and why?

Something about these ads rubbed me the wrong way. Even if it was thought through, it didn't seem that way. What did they hope to accomplish with this?  As I researched this further I was deeply unsatisfied with what I read about the movement and while I fully support its message I questioned its validity. When I tested for myself if any of these unfortunate autosuggestions would come up none did.

In fact, this ad campaign's first effect most likely was to drive traffic toward these negative autocomplete results as people attempted to test these results for themselves. Below are some screenshots of the current autocomplete for the phrases of the campaign.


  

Now, it's most likely that Google removed the offensive phrases from their autocomplete results after seeing the ad campaign, replacing them with more positive ones. I next tried Bing next to see what would be suggested there.



Bing's autocomplete results contrasted Google's and were quite shocking, to say the least. I found several highly offensive suggested searches. What surprised me most about these were how they were randomly distributed amongst completely innocent results. If nothing else, this certainly furthers the perception that Bing is far edgier than Google. I decided to go further down the rabbit hole and see where some of these search results lead, who would be promoting this mentality. So I went ahead and clicked on "women need to shut up and think."

Now, the youtube video at the bottom of the screenshot was quite harmless, and its essentially a woman self critiquing and talking about her tendency and the tendency of some women she knows to simply talk too much. The comments under the video were quite brash, however.         

Needless to say, I think I learned a great deal about the amount of online misogyny there is, and I hope everyone here did as well.

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