Background

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 the more recognised male athletes, even when facts say it’s a female athlete - making women and their achievements invisible.

So 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 internet's bias.

Idea​

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.

Strategy

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.

Results

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.