Though the Middle East and North Africa region had witnessed a number of breakthroughs when it comes to achieving gender equality, there was, and still is, a long way to go. Men are generally perceived and treated as superiors, with the Global Gender Gap Index published by the World Economic Forum in 2020 indicating that the Gender gap in this region was at 39.5%. This is especially rampant in the workplace, where women face significant challenges and inequalities. And while many men would declare that they support equal opportunities for women, they believe that the brunt of this fight concerns women only, and choose to look the other way to let their female counterparts fight their own battles.

As a tech company, Lenovo could no longer stand to see the gender inequality in an industry dominated by men. They decided to initiate the change closer to home, starting by raising awareness with its very own employees and partners.

We wanted to highlight that achieving equality concerns everyone, and is not a women-only issue. And we wanted to do it in a way that men simply couldn’t look away from. So, we chose to utilize a medium that people use at work every day, Microsoft Word.

Following extensive research, we realized that a main issue in the workplace is that many seemingly ‘positive’ words hold very different meanings for women than they do for men. For example, seniority for a man means authority, but for 64% of women means to have their abilities questioned constantly. Upper-level management means a salary increase for men, for women it means earning only 72.3% of what their male counterparts earn.

Which is why we created a plug-in for MS word that highlighted all these words as incorrect when typed by users, and then revealed the meaning these words hold for women by providing hard-hitting facts about gender inequality in the workplace.

By modifying the world’s most used program, we modified people’s behavior. And reminded them that actions speak louder than words.