The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[Undertoad]

The campaign was launched on October 2. At some point in October it was cancelled. That video was down before Google's cache of the page on December 1. So.

search Google News for "Hack a hair dryer". You get thousands of outrage take results.

Use Google's search tools to restrict your search to October.

This is the period during when the campaign was launched, and the outrage machine is not visible. There are no criticisms of the campaign. The first search result is a Vimeo page of - I did a little digging - the Art Director for the Hack A Hair Dryer campaign! The video is gone, but the cached search result includes the tag:

"The concept: take a hairdryer – something typically viewed for beautifying purposes – and make it gender-neutral..."

Here is the idea that made it through corporate. The original campaign actually INCLUDED the outrage take!

The first result not from IBM is a reaction to the campaign from the blog: "Tech Savvy Women". Their blog entry is still live and so you can see how women in tech reacted, when the outrage take hadn't launched:

One of the ways we will increase the number of women in STEM fields is to break through traditional thinking and consider a different perspective. A program that is embracing this idea is the Hack a Hair Dryer campaign. The idea is to take something feminine that is used on a regular basis and transform it to serve a different purpose.

It would appear that the outrage engine geared up on December 7. (That's when it arrived here.) And the BBC story HM linked to points that out:

After running for a couple of months more or less unnoticed online, IBM's "hack a hairdryer" campaign suddenly attracted a barrage of criticism by Twitter users who called it patronising and sexist

The campaign's take "make it gender-neutral" was nuanced, a little complex. That's why an appealing, simpler take could outweigh it. Original campaign: 3,633 views. Outrage engine: tens of thousands of news stories. Each story designed to tweak your outrage, and attract your attention, clicks, and shares.

But eventually we will not need the original campaign.