´Raparigas da Bola` (English translation: Ball Girls) is an advocacy group that fights to give more visibility to women in sports.

Raparigas da Bola wanted a campaign to raise awareness about the deep-rooted inequity that exists in sports coverage.

With zero budget to work with, we printed off a humble 30 copies of the newspapers, counting on the striking power of reproducing an exact representation of each of the 3 newspapers as two-tone infographics to capture the audience’s attention.

With the media spotlight on women on 8th march (International Women’s Day), then what better day than the 9th march to draw attention to the deep-rooted inequity that exists in sports coverage, everyday.

We needed a simple, powerfull, and eye-catching execution to turn the news of the day into a tool with which to fight for fairer visibility for female athletes.

That's why we turned the news of 9th, published by the Portugal's top 3 sports newspapers, into 3 infographic publications, highlighting the imbalance of media exposure between men and women in sport.

Some say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this campaign, one infographic really was worth a thousand words. We focused on one single item of data (the athlete’s gender) and turned three newspapers into 3 iconic infographics, essentially summarising data over 94 pages into 2 block items: male-athlete coverage and female-athlete coverage.

By turning our attention to Portugal’s top 3, tier-one, sports newspapers, and summarizing the information in them into gender-based data, we distinctly highlighted the blatant, disproportionate coverage of male athletes, and furthered the movement to break this cycle, and give more coverage to women athletes.

The combination of data, design, and courage, resulted in a tool with which people were able to use to fight for fairer visibility for female athletes.

In the early hours of the 9th March we digitized Portugal’s top 3 sports newspapers, replacing text and photos with two-tone block colours, illustrating the imbalance of coverage between male and female athletes. With a color assigned to each gender, the final infographics visually summed up the blatant bias given to male athletes, and in stark contrast to women’s coverage, with only a few squares sparsely dotted about the publications.

In order to get traction on social media, we partnered with 50 athletes who helped to amplify the campaign with their teammates and colleagues, spreading the campaign on social media with the hashtag #ElasTambémJogam (#WomenAlsoPlay).

From just 30 copies of the newspapers, we were able to reach an audience 52x larger than Portugal’s biggest sports newspaper.

With zero investment, including in media, but with a powerful execution, the campaign was able to:

. reach 52x more people than Portugal’s biggest sports newspaper;

. secure participation from more than 150 athletes to help spread the campaign;

. impact more than 32 countries;

. get traction on major news platforms around the globe;

. become the topic of the day on 9th March

. put pressure on sports newspapers to increase coverage of female athletes, reaching around a 100% increase in said coverage just one week after the campaign was run.

As a direct result of the campaign, one of the members of Raparigas da Bola was invited to write about gender equality in Portugal’s biggest sports newspaper.