After 20 years of research in partnership with Yale, we learned that great hair is a powerful tool for women’s transformations - that when women feel confident in their hair, they feel confident in themselves, their abilities, and what they’re able to achieve. But, their achievements aren’t always being reflected in search. 10% of search results for “CEO” depict women, despite women comprising 28% of the occupation, impacting the present and future generation’s ability to fathom how far they can go – after all, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

It was time for the brand, known for giving women visible hair transformation, to promote the transformative power it has in everyone’s lives.

Our objective was clear: we needed to take a first step towards changing societal perceptions of women’s achievements by changing behavior in search, and getting society to act by defying human bias where it was perpetuated.

In the US, 2018 was the “Year of the Woman” – women were doing and achieving more than ever before. But, women’s transformations aren’t getting the visibility they deserve in something we do every day – search, the number one source of data on the internet. And, in search, seeing is believing. The things we see every day shape who we are as individuals and as a society - 66% of Americans believe that “search engines are an unbiased source of information”.

Our idea was simple: Take the bias out of search.

Enter, S.H.E. – Search Human Equalizer. A Google Chrome extension that operates on the search backend, determining relevance and providing more balanced, clickable results.

S.H.E. was an open invitation for society to take the bias out of search and give women’s transformations the visibility they deserved. After all, if society created the bias, it could also remove it.

We needed to change society through change in search. But great change is only possible through the small actions we take every day.

So, we started where our 18-34 year-old US women were daily: in social media. There, we identified three macro conversation categories contributing to their sense of personal progress and transformation: representation in praise (via words such as Leader and Thinker) in achievements (such as CEO, Professor) and cultural representation (ethnicities and behavior). Within these categories, we identified and sized queries that were not yielding balanced results in search, thus were not yielding accurate representations of female-led transformations. And that became the core of the S.H.E. experience.

While S.H.E. balanced these terms by filtering and repositioning results, we equipped each individual to give more women the visibility they deserve by inviting them to try S.H.E., act on it and expand its base with additional biased terms for balance.

Spotlighting the problem wouldn’t be enough to take the bias out of search – we needed explicit action. To transform how the world sees women (and how women see themselves), we first needed to change how the world searched them.

Search engines are only a reflection of society and they use the behavioral data of its visitors to determine relevance in any given topic.

When a user clicks on the 5th result listed in a search engine instead of the 1st one, the algorithms learn to prioritize differently when enough users follow the same pattern.

So, we created S.H.E. – Search Human Equalizer – a Google Chrome extension that takes the bias out of search. Operating on the search backend, S.H.E. filters and repositions results to yield more accurate representation.

This not only changes the results for the user that has the chrome extension installed, but it orchestrates people with the extension installed as agents of change, to help shift the balance to more accurate results for the entire world.

S.H.E. successfully took a first step towards changing perceptions of women’s achievements by changing behavior in search:

S.H.E. generated 350M+ total impressions, 98% positive sentiment at launch and praise from 50+ change-makers, like Lean In, MAKERS and the founder of Girls Who Code.

Our video was a compelling launch of S.H.E. with 11.5M views, 83% of women stating it elevated their perception of Pantene and 79% feeling glad Pantene was spotlighting search bias. As Tweeted: “Pantene is taking a step in the right direction to show us what a less biased world could look like”.

With 6% lift in women’s level of concern about search bias, S.H.E. Extension install rate of 25% (same as Ad Blockers, one of the most used extensions) and 800 terms submitted, we got society to help take the bias out of search

Since launch, volume growth is 4% ahead of category