Shifting discriminatory gender norms affecting women in the workplace: Social media campaigns in Indonesia, the Philippines and Viet Nam
Summary
Between 2020 and 2022, Investing in Women (IW) supported social media campaigns aimed at those aged 18 to 40 in Indonesia, the Philippines and Viet Nam. These campaigns challenged four key norms that had been identified by IW’s programme as impeding women’s economic advancement, namely norms surrounding caregiving, breadwinning, job segregation, and leadership.
This report reflects on the learning from these social media initiatives in the three countries. It outlines how social media campaigns can be used as a tool to challenge gender norms and create more equitable workplaces. This report synthesizes evidence of the campaigns’ impact and discusses approaches that proved to be effective.
It discusses how these campaigns should focus on creating positive images of women and challenging existing stereotypes through storytelling, using relatable characters, fostering dialogue, and providing practical solutions to enact change.
The report highlights the need for further research into the long-term impact of these campaigns and suggests strategies for scaling up social media initiatives to drive systemic change. It also offers best practices for leveraging technology platforms.
This briefing paper was originally published on the ALiGN website.
Highlights
- The social media campaigns tackled four focal gender norms, including caregiving, breadwinning, gender-based job segregation, and leadership. Caregiving (sharing care responsibilities) generated the most discussions, but it focused more on benefits to children or intrinsic fairness, instead of touching on expanding women’s economic opportunities.
- Discussions on other topics (e.g., mental health, parenting) proved fruitful spaces to seed conversations about harmful norms and their effect on women’s, men’s, and children’s wellbeing. This points to the potential of a strategy focused on bringing a focus on gender equality and norms to wider discussions.
- Some building blocks of norm change appeared to be among the most valuable immediate outcomes of campaigns: strengthening individuals’ courage and resolve to engage in discussion on, and challenge, gender inequalities; and strengthening virtual support networks.
- Social media is often more effective at sharing information and raising new ideas than promoting discussion and deliberation. Some campaign participants were deterred from posting content for fear of ‘toxic’ responses.
- A sustained online presence, leveraging existing reputation, seeding content in organic communities and engaging influencers can all help to increase reach and engagement, which underpin effective campaigns. The research also highlighted the value of combining online and offline activities, both to reach different audiences and to maintain interest in online campaigns.
