2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Background

When it comes to closing the Gender Gap, the Middle East and North Africa region comes dead last. The Global Gender Gap Index 2020 published by the World Economic Forum indicates that the Gender gap in this region is 39.5% (compared to 23.3% in Western Europe and 27.1% in North America).It will take the MENA region over 139.9 years to achieve equality. Gender inequality also has economic consequences.The region loses USD 575 billion per year due to the barriers women face in the workplace daily according to PWC. Lenovo MENA knows that businesses thrive when there's equality among genders. Hence, the brand is deeply committed to the issue as a Global Partner of the Women's Forum for the Economy & Society. However, most employees in the region (and B2B clients) are not aware of Lenovo's commitment to Gender Equality.It was crucial for the company to involve everyone in fighting inequality.

The Interpretation of the Challenge (30% of vote)

In the region, although there have been many strides towards achieving gender equality, men are still perceived and treated as superiors, especially in the workplace. The consequence is that even though men declare that it's important to achieve equality, most of them think that it's a fight that only concerns women. We had to demonstrate that equality is everyone's job. After extensive research, we realized that the main issue in the workplace is that some words don't mean the same thing for women as they do for men. For example, seniority for a man means authority, but for 64% of women means to have their abilities questioned constantly. Upper-level management means a salary increase for men, for women it means earning only 72.3% of what their male counterparts earn. Hard-hitting facts and stats became one of our best weapons to raise awareness.

The Insight / Breakthrough Thinking (30% of vote)

In the region, although there have been many strides towards achieving gender equality, men are still perceived and treated as superiors, especially in the workplace. The consequence is that even though men declare that it's important to achieve equality, most of them think that it's a fight that only concerns women. We had to demonstrate that equality is everyone's job. After extensive research, we realized that the main issue in the workplace is that some words don't mean the same thing for women as they do for men. For example, seniority for a man means authority, but for 64% of women means to have their abilities questioned constantly. Upper-level management means a salary increase for men, for women it means earning only 72.3% of what their male counterparts earn. Hard-hitting facts and stats became one of our best weapons to raise awareness.

The Creative Idea (20% of vote)

Women face significant challenges and inequalities in the workplace that men are not aware of. We wanted to highlight this issue in an attention-grabbing way that simply couldn’t be ignored. So, we chose to utilize a medium that people use at work every day, Microsoft Word. We realized that many seemingly positive workplace words have a very different meaning for women than they do for men. So, we created a plug-in for MS word which highlighted all these words as incorrect when typed by users, and then revealed the meaning these words hold for women by providing hard-hitting facts about gender inequality in the workplace. By modifying the world’s most used program, we modified people’s behavior. And reminded them that actions speak louder than words.

The Outcome / Results (20% of vote)

Every single employee in Lenovo and each one of their B2B partners (more than 6 different companies) that installed the plugin got to interact with our idea. Adding up, we are talking about more than 10,000 employees that got surprised by words that are correctly spelled but had a red underline. We launched an internal survey among male employees to measure the impact of the campaign and over 80% found that the hard-hitting facts were shocking. 92% considered that the words helped them inform themselves and become aware of the topic,75% felt that they play an important role in achieving equality within their workplace and 43% even declared that the onus was on them to change things. Furthermore, the campaign achieved a +USD 1,2M of earned media, more than +1M website visits in the first week, the idea was adapted to 4 different languages and 10 countries, obtaining +25M impressions.