United by a desire to make a difference for women’s equality, Georgia Patch and Kiah Nicholas have started #redefinewomen, a social movement that turns to the power of the people to “help change the way women are perceived, by changing the way women are defined.”
As two executives in the advertising industry, Georgia and Kiah spend a lot of time with words. While looking up some definitions, they noticed that the sentence examples on Google search were “objectively sexist”. To get Google’s attention to this problem, they created the Instagram page and hashtag #redefinewomen, where they post the offending definitions and encourage others to share.
“How women are perceived starts with how women are defined.”
“We believe that the present state of definition examples reinforce prejudices against women,” Georgia told WYSK in an email. “Some of them sound like they are straight out of the 1950s. It started with ‘nagging’ and ‘rabid’ and, like dominos, one word led to another.”
Ultimately, the women want to start a conversation about language and contemporize the way women are defined. “We realized that the bigger conversations happening around feminism would be more impactful if the fundamentals were addressed, being words,” Georgia explains.
While the women haven’t heard from Google yet, they hope that they will. “It isn’t about slandering Google; we are asking them to come on board. We recognize Google as a progressive, contemporary and trusting brand that we respect. We think this is a brand that has the power to help us turn these examples to be gender neutral.”
So what can you do? Follow #redefinewomen, regram their posts and “politely ask Google to jump on board and make this crucial change.”
Words matter.