You start by seeing the name of you the country that you are currently in (automatically detected), for example Sweden, and then when you tilt the phone to the left you move down the ranks in the list to the country just below your country and then the next and then the next - the speed depends on how much you are tilting the phone. Tilt the phone the other way, and you move up again in the list, back to your country and then past it to see all the countries that have a higher ranking than yours. Besides the country name we could add ranking number, maybe the gender gap index and maybe some minimalistic graphic.
If time permits, we could also add the function of being able to see the details of a specific country. So if I chose Sweden, I would again have the possibility of moving left/right with the phone, and the the further left I got, the more dominated towards men and the more right I turn it, the more dominated towards women - or the way around.
IDEA: THE PRIVATE EQUALITY GAP
If we want to reach a large-scale audience and not just people who are already interested in the subject, we need to make it relevant to them.
The problem is that most of the metrics in the WEF-data are of a somewhat systemic nature: “are these laws in place”, “can women access education”, “do women have the right to x”, “how many ministers are female” and so on. These are all very relevant, but maybe mostly so for those who don’t have those rights. In the Western world, we take it for granted that women can go to primary school and universities etc etc, because it has been like that for longer than most of us can remember.
What we basically want to do is take our public systemic data and add a layer of “private equality”.
We ask couples about the gender roles in their relationship. It could be:
· Who stays home from work when the children at sick?
For each question/metric, the user can drag a small slider towards either “Him” or “Her” or somewhere in between to show how this person perceives their daily routines. So, imagine that we put this little quiz or survey on different newspapers’ website – first a woman answers the questions, she is then encouraged to email-invite her partners to answer the same questions. When both parties in the relationship have answered the same questions, we might suddenly see that there is a gap in their perception of who does the most work on the domestic tasks (if that is what we ask them about). This gap is interesting, because it’s basically a measure of a mindset. How do we think about equality?
A woman answers all questions and the aggregated result is 0.6, which tells us that she thinks she does most of the chores.
Her partner answers the same questions and gets the result 1.0, which tells us that he thinks that everything is equal in their relationship. This gives us a perceived gender gap of 0.4 in this relationship. There’s definitely something to discuss around the dinner table that night (we will of course put ads for divorce lawyers and therapists on the page J). After the couple has been presented with the result of their test, they are encouraged to read more about gender equality on a bigger scale on our website, which is then “the real” website with all our WEF-data.
