Re-Search: Now you can see it
"Re-Search is an extension that automatically will make your image searches of different professions more gender balanced. By finding images that already exist and presenting them right alongside your regular search result."
Take a moment now and open a new tab in your browser. Search images for teacher, nurse and secretary. Now search images for doctor, engineer and professor. See a difference?
Stereotypes exist for a reason but not because they are synonymous or useful for modern ways of living and thinking. When performing image searches for varying professions, users are presented with standardized or conventional images that allude to a much grander and harsher truth about what it means to be a new professional navigating the marketplace: that professions are gender specific.
Swedish technology company, Semcon, launched a new browser extension called Re-Search that gives men and women a more balanced space in terms of image search results. Re-Search was developed in an effort to provide a concrete solution for profession searches: producing a more balanced perspective of careers without one gender dominating over the other.
When performing an image search with Re-Search, an alternative search is done in parallel in a new window, bringing forward pictures that would otherwise end up further down, thus providing more gender equal search results.
“If engineers are portrayed as men in yellow helmets, how can young women feel that the job might be of interest to them? Role models are important when people are thinking about their career choices and the internet is the first place many people look for information,” says Anna Funke, Project Manager for Re-Search at Semcon.
Re-Search is free and works with the most popular browsers and will be able to moderate over 60 different professions in English. Semcon encourages individuals and companies to develop the product further to promote and stimulate gender equality.
“This is a tough but necessary goal,” says Markus Granlund, President and CEO of Semcon. “... we need to bring in lots of different perspectives to better represent the end users, [by] including more women … a more diverse mix of employees is essential to creating an inspiring workplace and a successful business.”