What Real Women Look Like: Seven Years of Crowdsourced Data for the Greater Good
Some backstory: I recently went back to school to hone my data-analysis skills and learn data science. Now I want to put my new knowledge to work to delve into the amazing set of data that is MyBodyGallery.com. I’ve been lucky to work for this incredible website for the past three years, and it is a treasure trove of crowdsourced data about women’s bodies. As the first in a series of articles, I thought I’d start with some corporate history, so you can understand how this dataset came to be.
In 2010, Odessa Cozzolino had a vision — what if women could band together to produce a crowd-sourced database of images of female bodies unmanipulated by media forces? She wondered: would it be possible to create a safe, online space where women could browse pictures that their peers took of themselves to gain an empowering assessment of the wide variety of bodies out there in the world?
As a photographer, Cozzolino had noticed that women had been demoralized by the influence of advertising and media. These forces perpetuate poor body image and mandate only one particular model for women: tall and thin; usually Caucasian; with flawless skin, narrow shoulders and hips, and large breasts. The use of photographic enhancement tools like Photoshop just make things even worse. They take women’s bodies and craft them into semi-fictionalized forms that do not transparently reflect the body that had posed in front of the camera. Only a very small proportion of women can fit this advertising- and media-preferred look in a natural or healthy way.
Cozzolino saw the damaging effects of a sense of failure in achieving this cultural ideal in the comments and body language of the women she was photographing. She did some research into body image issues, especially body dysmorphia. Cozzolino discovered that women rarely saw themselves clearly. She believed that if women could see themselves objectively, in the form of a stranger with the same statistics, perhaps they could be more realistic about their own body. With the rise of social media and crowd-sourced, internet-based projects, she realized she might be able to make a difference.
Taking a leap of faith, she came up with the name “My Body Gallery”. After securing the domain MyBodyGallery.com, with start-up spirit she hired “a guy in his garage” to build the initial website. Going live in February of 2010, the website took off wildly. It drew international media attention from mainstream to niche outlets alike, including Good Morning America, Jezebel.com, and the Huffington Post. Ever the savvy businesswoman, Cozzolino realized the site’s traffic could support enough advertising revenue to transform what began as a labor of love into a sustainable small business.
In 2014, MyBodyGallery.com had become successful enough to add a part-time employee to oversee operations. I came on board as Creative and Marketing Director, sustaining the company’s commitment to women in leadership positions. Over the years, my role has significantly evolved far beyond my title. I’ve overseen adapting to constant changes in online advertising revenue. I managed a responsive re-design for the site so it would function smoothly on mobile. I’m even the person who gets those 2 am text messages to restart MySQL when the site crashes.
MyBodyGallery.com has consistently operated profitably through its seven-year history, covering all expenses and being able to invest in improvements. In a comparison with 21 women-run startups in a recent January 2017 Business Insider article, MyBodyGallery.com ranks higher in traffic than most of them on Alexa.com.
This long-term success of MyBodyGallery.com demonstrates that greater-good projects can be financially sustainable using digital advertising as a means of covering necessary costs. It is also a testament to women-owned-and-operated tech projects and the power of crowdsourced content to inspire and aid people all over the world.
But to get to some of the data…The site has averaged 3 million pageviews per month over its lifetime. Its nearly 75,000 registered users have uploaded over 30,000 images that fit the publication guidelines (and thousands more that didn’t). Today, MyBodyGallery.com can boast of visitors from every single UN Member State in the world (except Nauru — so if any of you live in Nauru, please visit our site so we have them all!) and many other “unofficial” geographical regions — 16 million unique visitors in all.
I thought for this first post I’d make a few quick data visualizations showing the geographical reach of the site using Tableau Public. Obviously the data is skewed with over 15 million sessions from the US (the next in line pales in comparison with Canada at around 1.7 million). [Note: many of our visitors view the site over many sessions — the session total is over 21 million.] So have fun browsing the interactive format in two ways: a traditional shaded map where the totals per country will pop up as you hover over them and in a treemap where you can more easily see how the country totals compare to each other. Because the data is so skewed, there’s not a huge range of colors, but the animation will allow you to see the specific visitor totals.
Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be a way to embed a Tableau visualization into Medium so you’ll have to click through to get the full experience, but I made a short screen-grab video for you to see some of the data at work. Enjoy!
