Insights from a Google Search Experiment: ‘Men’s Equality’ & ‘Women’s Equality’

Summary of this post: Googling ‘Washington state women’s equality’ produces webpages about women’s equality. Googling ‘Washington state men’s equality’ also produces webpages about women’s equality. There is much history yet to be made in the realm of men’s equality. Internet searches years from now will present more content about efforts to empower and uplift boys and men.

Narrow understanding of ‘gender equality’

‘Gender equality’ is synonymous with ‘advancement for women and girls’ in most people’s minds. This incomplete view is understandable, but it is a problem.

An example of the problem is the Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, launched last year with $30 million in donations from billionaires Melinda Gates and MacKenzie Bezos. It aims to “accelerate progress toward gender equality.” However, 100% of Equality Can’t Wait’s grants are awarded to causes that focus on empowering women and girls. The Seattle Times editorial board praised Gates and Bezos and repeated their use of the term ‘gender equality’ in their editorial titled “A welcome boost toward gender equality“. Here are two quotes from that piece.

“A new program to advance gender equality, announced this week by Melinda Gates and MacKenzie Bezos, provides a welcome boost.” …

“The challenge is part of a tremendous $1 billion pledge Gates made last year to advance gender equality.” …

The Seattle Times (June 18, 2020)

Honesty and accuracy on this issue would require replacing “gender equality” in The Seattle Times editorial with the words “advancement for women and girls.” Politicians, philanthropists, journalists, activists, and academics make this error over and over again, and it demonstrates how pervasive is a narrow understanding of the concept of gender equality.

Efforts toward achieving gender equality are not interchangeable with efforts toward empowering women and girls. Certainly some female empowerment efforts contribute to the cause of gender equality, but not all efforts toward gender equality must be about empowering females. That is an outdated mode of thinking. Data reveal that in a variety of areas of gender inequality and inequity, males are most in need of help. See our collection of pages on Boys and Men’s Issues and our posts on Gender Disparities for more information.

A Google search experiment

A worthwhile exercise when researching any topic is to perform an internet search and observe which websites make it onto the first page of the search results. (We are aware that search results are impacted by a variety of factors and are not identical from one person’s web browser to the next.)

As an experiment, we cleared all our browsing history and then Googled two sets of words:

1. Washington state women’s equality
2. Washington state men’s equality

What do you get when you Google ‘Washington state women’s equality’?

We Googled ‘Washington state women’s equality’ and made a list of the topics of each of the first ten search results. Here is the list of topics of each webpage and, in parenthesis, the name of the organization the webpage belongs to:

1. Topic: Women’s rights information (ACLU of Washington)
2. Topic: History of women’s suffrage in Washington (Washington Secretary of State)
3. Topic: History of women’s suffrage in Washington (Wikipedia)
4. Topic: History of women’s suffrage in Washington (Crosscut)
5. Topic: History of women’s suffrage in Washington (League of Women Voters of Washington)
6. Topic: History of women’s suffrage in Washington (Municipal Research and Services Center)
7. Topic: Women’s involvement in Seattle’s civil rights activism (University of Washington)
8. Topic: History of women’s suffrage in Washington (National Park Service)
9. Topic: Influential women in Washington’s history (USA Today)
10. Topic: Washington state feminist history (National Women’s Political Caucus of Washington)

When Googling ‘Washington state women’s equality’, all ten of the webpages on the first page of the search results have topics that appropriately fit into the overall category of ‘women’s equality’.

Now let’s see what we get when we Google ‘Washington state men’s equality’.

Googling ‘Washington state men’s equality’?

In our top ten search results for ‘Washington state men’s equality’, eight of the ten webpages were mostly or entirely about striving for women’s equality – and the other two webpages had nothing to do with gender equality. None of the top ten search results had anything to do with striving for men’s equality.

Below are the topics of each webpage displayed when we Googled ‘Washington state men’s equality’.

1. Topic: Women earn less than men in Washington (Seattle Times)
2. Topic: Women earn less than men in King County (Seattle Magazine)
3. Topic: Sex-based discrimination laws regarding employment (a law firm in Washington)
4. Topic: Washington’s 1972 Equal Rights Amendment (Puget Sound University Law Review)
5. Topic: The Washington State Equal Pay and Opportunities Act (State of Washington)
6. Topic: A men’s basketball game in January 2021 between WSU and UW (Pac-12 Conference)
7. Topic: A men’s basketball game in February 2021 between WSU and UW (Pac-12 Conference)
8. Topic: Inequity for women’s athletics in Washington (Washington State University Magazine)
9. Topic: Feminism and Amy Mazur, WSU professor of political science (Washington State University)
10. Topic: Substandard workout facilities provided for female athletes at NCAA basketball tournament (Spokesman Review)

Men’s equality history is yet to be made

It is not surprise that searching the internet for ‘men’s equality’ turns up mostly content about the fight for women’s equality. Much of the history of men’s equality in Washington is yet to be made! Making that history is ultimately the goal of this website. Thank you for following and supporting Washington Initiative for Boys and Men. We believe web searches years from now will produce more content about efforts to empower men and boys. Males as a class of human beings and females as a class of human beings both deserve fair treatment and equal concern for their problems.

Note: We may write a future blog post about a similar Google search experiment but using different search terms. For example, ‘Washington state women’s movement’ and ‘Washington state men’s movement’ or ‘Washington state feminism’ and ‘Washington state masculism’ may produce interesting search results.