#WomenAlsoPlay
Raparigas da Bola
Issue 60 | January 2022
Agency
Havas Lisbon
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Paulo Pinto Creative Director: José Vieira Digital Creative Director: Margarida Pedreira Copywriter: Bernardo Tavares Art Director: Alex Meneses
Production Team
Graphic Production Director: António Fernandes Art Finalist: Nuno Nascimento Production Company: Garage Films Executive Producer: Miguel Varela Director: David Infante Producers: Beatriz Pereira, Patricia Tavares Editor: Miguel Monteiro Assistant Director: Júlio Paixão Assistants: João Bettencourt, Miguel Monteiro
Other Credits
Account Director: Sérgio Resende Account: Marta Costa Media: Ana Torres Client: Marta Faria
Date
March 2021
Background
Sports newspapers turned into a graphic that shows the media exposure gap between men and women.
It’s commonplace to see an increase in news coverage about women on International Women’s Day; however, usually by the following day things have gone back to how they were before: male dominated news coverage. And it’s this inequality that Havas Lisbon and a group called Raparigas da Bola (English translation: Ball Girls) want to put an end to.
Idea
In order to highlight the inequality of exposure given by the top 3, tier-one, sports newspapers to female athletes, they came up with an action launched one day after International Women’s Day.
The initiative, #WomenAlsoPlay, involves reproducing an exact representation of each of the 3 newspapers on 9th march as two-tone infographics, highlighting the inequality of coverage by colour coding every column based on gender coverage: one colour for men and one for women, to illustrate just how biased media coverage is towards male athletes.
Early on the morning of 9th, the newspapers, fresh off the press, were digitalized, every column inch color-coded by gender, printed and then delivered to journalists, influencers, and athletes so they were able to share it with their fans and followers.
All the newspapers’ logos were covered with a sticker using the campaign’s hashtag: #WomenAlsoPlay. The sticker also mentions Raparigas da Bola’s key message: don’t leave women athletes on the sidelines.