In today’s day and age, it’s practically unthinkable to consider gender inequality as a persisting issue. UN Women however, sees that despite decades of global advancement, discrimination and prejudice towards women is still rampant worldwide. We needed to lay this bare to audiences in both developed and developing societies, with the intention to reignite a conversation everyone thought was finished, paving the way for real change.

Using Google’s autocomplete function, fed by over 6 billion searches daily, we held up a mirror to the world and exposed the hidden truth on gender bias that still prevails today. The shocking search results became the faces of our campaign, driving people to join a global discussion through social media and transforming the world into one enormous UN forum for the people via our campaign hashtag (#womenshould).

The Most Shared Ad of 2013 (Adweek). Social Good Campaign of 2013 (Ad Council). The campaign reached 1.2 Billion Global Impressions and 224 Million Twitter Impressions. More than mass media coverage in every continent (BBC, The Guardian, Time, Huffington Post, CNN, Times of India, Folha de Sao Paulo and more) it drove men and women to debate the topic on social media (#womenshould), TV talk shows, radio stations, blogs, PR summits and in classrooms worldwide. With a few simple facts, the campaign made people rethink the state of gender equality today and helped put it back on the global agenda.

By exposing these shocking sentiments using a technology familiar to us all, we offered people a stark glimpse into the global society. The autocomplete results initiated people to try it for themselves, which further added to the viral nature of the campaign in driving to behavior. Whether it was in English, Spanish, Swedish, Arabic or Mandarin, the perceptions that people discovered for themselves were undeniably universal. For a newly established entity such as UN Women with constrained budgets, our campaign was effective in sparking the intended conversation and reaffirmed the organization’s need to continue its humanitarian efforts to drive real change.