Rejoice: Image Searches Just Became More Gender-Balanced

By Sponsor in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 2, 2016 6:00AM

If you’ve ever seen those “Men At Work” signs and raised a bit of an eyebrow, well, you’re not the only one. It should come as no surprise that other genders—not just men—inhabit our working world. Female engineers? Check. Female surgeons? Check and check. It goes the other way too—not all preschool teachers are men, in case you haven’t noticed. Seems like recognizing all genders in the workplace should be a pretty obvious concept, correct?

Unfortunately, there’s a corner of the internet that has not yet caught up with this phenomena of a multi-gendered workplace: image searches. Go ahead and try typing “engineer” into your browser—and click images. You might be a bit shocked by all the testosterone. And the truth is, image searches for many careers fall prey to gender stereotypes all the time.

Recognizing the need for change, a browser extension called Re-Search is being launched, which gives men and women more equal space in the search results. Swedish technology company Semcon is behind the solution, and they are making Re-Search available free of charge and as open source software.

When you perform an image search of professions with Re-Search, an alternative search is done in parallel to make the results more gender balanced. The alternative search results are presented in a new window where pictures that would otherwise end up further down are brought forward.

Time to celebrate all those female chemists and male nurses. For more information, check out Re-Search’s website here.

This post is brought to you by Re-Search.