Glass: The Lion For Change > Glass: The Lion for Change
HAVAS, Lisboa / RAPARIGAS DA BOLA / 2021
Overview
Credits
Background
´Raparigas da Bola` (English translation: Ball Girls) is an advocacy group that fights to give more visibility to women in sports.
When it comes to sports media coverage, the difference between the coverage that male athletes get and females athletes receive is even more blatant. In Portugal, this gap is even wider. Take a look at any of Portugal's main sports newspapers and you’ll quickly notice it.
There are 3 important sport newspapers in Portugal, with huge audiences that predominantly focus on male athletes.
Raparigas da Bola wanted a campaign to raise awareness about the deep-rooted inequity that exists in sports coverage.
Describe the cultural / social / political climate and the significance of the work within this context
Portugal is a small country with 10 million inhabitants, and a country that lives by old values. Sexism, unfortunately, is ingrained in Portuguese culture.
Only ? of Portugal’s professional athletes are women. Despite that, in the last european indoor athletics championships, Portugal achieved its best result ever, winning 3 gold medals, ? of which were won by female athletes.
Historically speaking, Portugal’s female athletes are high achievers. And currently, things are no different:
. The world’s best female futsal goalkeeper is from Portugal
. Portugal has the 2nd best futsal female national team of Europe
. Portugal’s national hockey team came 2nd in the last European championship
. Portugal’s only Olympic medalist in 2016 was a woman: Telma Monteiro
And even with so many reasons to be proud of their female athletes, the media doesn’t give them the coverage they deserve. Just recently, a newspaper named the female football player Ana Borges “Man of the Match”. And a few days later the coach of a soccer team said that football belongs to men, in a slight aimed at a female commentator.
Describe the creative idea
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.
With that in mind, we turned the news of 9th, published in the Portugal's top 3 sports newspapers, into 3 infographic publications, highlighting the imbalance of media exposure between men and women in sport.
The news of the day became a tool with which to fight for fairer visibility for female athletes.
Describe the strategy
Even having talented athletes that already won medals, the newspapers still don’t give the right importance to those female athletes and many others.
If the athletes performances aren’t making the newspapers cover female athletes, we tried a different approach: to highlight the gender inequality in media coverage, with simple infographics, everyone would understand.
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.
The simplicity of color-coding every column inch based on gender was the strategy we used to highlight gender inequality in media coverage, and by doing so we turned those infographics into a tool with which people could fight for fairer visibility for women in sports, just by sharing the campaign and joining the movement #WomenAlsoPlay (#ElasTambémJogam) movement.
Describe the execution
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.
Describe the results / impact
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.
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