Princesses or Pippis — the Stock Photo edition

It’s Monday. I’m sitting at my computer doing what I do quite a lot — searching the internet. This time it’s directly related to a talk I’m giving this Thursday on the importance of female role models. It’s entitled Princesses or Pippis — why role models make a difference.

Part of my research in this field is taking a stroll through the vast amounts of stock photos available. Being databases that most media rely on for photo representation of any given situation, it’s quite a good indicator on what’s in and what’s not.

Through the last couple of years, it’s been a continued journey of mine to try and locate photo representation of the female tech person. Not the female tech customer, confused user, helpless user and so forth. These are still very easy to find.

As always its quite discouraging. Out of several thousand pictures, one series represent a female technician helping a male customer, and he’s not even portrayed as confused or bewildered. He’s just sitting there with a dashing smile, ‘allowing’ the female to do the work.

Whenever I’m hired to do talks about the female shortage in the STEM fields, these are the visuals I bring. And I’m equally depressed about the result every time.

There’s a severe gap between the genders in especially tech, and with a world not demanding better photos and stereotypes, we’ve got a long way to go.