The internet has a bias.

Search algorithms are trained on human behaviour, designed to give us what they think we’re looking for. Now, they’ve learnt our bias towards men.

Asked simple, non-gendered questions, like “who has scored the most goals in international football?”, search engines prioritise more recognised male athletes, even when facts say it’s a female athlete - making women and their achievements invisible.

Backed by the United Nations, Team Heroine, a women’s sport marketing agency that seeks to connect female athletes with brands to ensure they're better recognized in a world where women’s sport receives just 0.4% of media coverage and 4% of total sponsorship, aimed to correct the bias by highlighting the inaccuracies in our search results and getting as many people as possible to share and report them to the search engines, so they could be corrected, to achieve Sustainable Development Goal #5 for gender equality.

Search algorithms are trained on human behaviour. Algorithms have learned to tell us that Cristiano Ronaldo’s 118 international goals are superior to female footballer Christine Sinclair’s 190 international goals, because that's what they think people want to see.

The way these algorithms work is closely guarded by the search engine companies themselves, who don't want big problems like a bias in their algorithm being public. This along with the sheer size of these companies makes seeing change a very difficult process.

This campaign forced them to take notice by reporting the bias on an unprecedented scale, using their own feedback system, and people power.

The factually incorrect searches we are correcting are why so many of the best sportsmen are household names, while the greatest sportswomen have little name recognition at all, and why little girls who search the internet for women to inspire them often only seen men.

We created an initiative that used the power of the people who use the internet, to right the wrongs of it. Our mission: Correct The Internet and make the achievements of sportswomen visible.

The only way to correct search engines is by people sending feedback when they find something wrong. So we developed a tool that highlighted the incorrect searches that create the bias, and allowed people to report them with just a couple of clicks. New incorrect searches were revealed each day, showing the world the problem and inspiring them to take action.

To ensure search engines didn’t dismiss our feedback as bots, we created hundreds of unique report messages to be sent from different user IP addresses around the world. Our simplified way of giving feedback made it quick and easy to report feedback on a scale the search engines couldn’t ignore, making them to take action too.

Internally, this problem has been on search engine radars for years, with many teams experimenting solutions. Monetised opportunities often take priority, so these teams struggle securing resources to implement solutions.

To make them prioritise this problem, we focussed on:

-External pressure (PR/awareness) on marketing/business, targeting the ‘trust’ pillar of brand health tracking which we know is monitored.

-Internal engineering pressure via bug reports from millions of users, to prioritise our corrections.

We conducted an audit of simple, non-gendered searches across Google, Bing, Yahoo & Baidu, collecting search results that used incorrect statistical data to create bias. We quickly discovered 50+ incorrect searches and added them to our tool for people to report.

With 50+ inaccuracies that affected different countries, sports, teams, and athletes, we revealed new stats each day until we saw change, each targeting a new audience, creating enough internal and external pressure for the search engines to act.

To get the attention of the search engines, we needed people power to deliver the feedback highlighting each inaccuracy to each search engine.

We launched with a film that showed the reality of what happens when a little girl asks the internet a question and receives an answer that incorrectly puts a sportsman ahead of a sportswoman. This film quickly spread around the world, inspiring people to act.

This led them to the online tool we developed to highlight the incorrect searches and allowed people to report them as direct feedback messages with just a couple of clicks.

New incorrect search results were revealed each day across social, digital, and OOH, and shared globally. Each targeted a new audience,

building us a following of athletes, sports teams, advocacy groups, media and the public, which led to more and more reports being made and saw search engines take action.

Our campaign reached over 1 billion people globally.

Had 120+ pieces of media coverage, including BBC, NBC, Fox News, Sky Sport & Forbes.

Millions of people reported to search engines through our tool, social channels, and the media.

And we’re now supported by over 50 global brands, including the United Nations.

When we started, the search results never showed sportswomen.

Although people can be served different results based on location, demographic and search history, we are now beginning to see change to many of the searches, correctly recognizing a female.

Now, a problem that has existed within search engines for decades has new momentum and is being solved, with search engines deploying new features to highlight women’s sport, offering both male and female results on searches.

It takes time for these changes to become consistent and widespread, but through Correct The Internet, sportswomen are now becoming more and more visible.