Today, World Woman Foundation released the Digital Gender Diversity Impact Report in partnership with Hootsuite, Georgetown University’s Business for Impact, and VMLY&R Commerce. The report showcases the power of digital media to promote gender equality in a bold new way—providing best practices that brands and organizations can leverage to drive positive social change and increase engagement.
To create the report, World Woman Hour utilised Hootsuite’s analytics tool (Hootsuite Impact) and social listening capabilities to analyse the campaign's reach and effectiveness and deliver ten recommendations by which digital media can be used to empower women.
“We were thrilled to participate in this initiative with World Woman Foundation by providing Hootsuite’s platform to help enable the distribution of this barrier-breaking content for women around the world,'' said Eva Taylor, head of corporate social responsibility at Hootsuite. “We continue to see disparity and inequality for women globally, as showcased through our Digital 2021 report, which finds that women are still behind men when it comes to social media access and literacy rates. We also know that the gender gap has further widened due to the global pandemic. This makes collaborative initiatives such as World Woman Hour more important and impactful than ever before, in order to help drive positive social change and increase engagement when it comes to gender equality.”
The report focuses on the impact and take-aways from World Woman Hour, a global digital micro-story-telling platform featuring inspiring stories of 60 women, told in 60 seconds, and collectively visualized in a powerful 60 minutes of the film—in celebration of last year’s International Day of the Girl Child on October 11th.
The social-first movement included hero stories from Cynthia Erivo, Jane Goodall, Angelica Hale, and Kechi Okwuchi (to name a few), with the goal to find a positive role model for one million girls by 2030 and inspire them to follow their hearts and ambitions; it was brought to life by an all-women production team during the global pandemic.
"World Woman Hour stories unleash the power of women in a bold new way that is about progress, positive change, and possibilities. The report provides strategic guidance to corporations to invest in digital gender equality platforms such as World Woman Hour. We know that amplifying women's stories is key to the digital empowerment of 1.9 billion female social media users and making equality a reality," said Rupa Dash, CEO, World Woman Foundation.
According to Hootsuite’s Digital 2021 Report, there are 5 billion internet users worldwide, with 4.2 billion people currently on social media; 45% of global social media users are women, while their male counterparts account for 55%. In addition, women hold a global literacy rate of 83%, while men hold a literacy rate of 90%. Although many improvements have been made to remedy gender inequities worldwide, the gap still prevails.
World Woman’s Hour reached 47.95 million impressions across social media platforms. A word cloud, provided via Hootsuite’s integration with social listening tool Brandwatch, reported 34% of the posts reflected confidence, 37%, courage, and 29%, choice. Although most of the World Woman Hour ‘Hero’ social media accounts are in English, many of the heroes are from different countries and wrote messages in other languages.
Hootsuite’s analytics tools found that empowerment stories featuring women garnered an 89% positive sentiment on social media, and countries with the most engaged audiences included the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Australia, Germany, Palestine, Indonesia, Colombia, and Brazil—while the top languages featured were English, Spanish, Estonian, and Turkish.
"It was an honour and privilege to work with World Woman Foundation on this powerful hour of content that will continue to be viewed by millions and impact generations of women,'' said Beth Ann Kaminkow, Global CEO VMLY&R Commerce. “As these sixty women and sixty stories represent, much progress has been made around the world when women dare to follow their dreams; but, much work still needs to be done to close the gaps. We all have a role to play in that."