2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for Media?

This work is relevant for media as the core of the idea was to utilize a medium that our target audience uses every day, yet remains untapped. We brought our idea to life in a way that only Microsoft Word possibly could, using the functionality of the program itself to highlight the negative meaning that many common workplace words hold for women. Microsoft Word became our media. In addition, we used Internal Comms and Linkedin content to reach our target where we knew they would be in the right mindset, as well as social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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.

Describe the creative idea / insights (30% 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.

Describe the strategy (20% 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.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

We combined data and hard-hitting facts to develop an innovative plug-in for MS Word. When downloaded, this plug-in highlighted over 250 everyday workplace words as incorrect, and when clicked on, revealed the true meaning of these words for women in the workplace. Lenovo’s IT team installed the plug-in on every employee’s PC to raise awareness in their own workplace. The idea then expanded to 6 of Lenovo’s B2B clients via a website where they could download our plug-in and learn valuable advice on how to tackle inequality in their own workplace. Our site was promoted through Internal Comms, as well as social content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

List the results (30% 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.