Powerful Rascals
Oops! I thought we would have outgrown this gender cliché by 2024: the infantilization of female leaders.
Photo: Lisa Hallgren, Dagens Industri Weekend, 2024. Thanks for the tip, @piamargaretaandersson!
Sisters Madeleine Brehmer and Caroline Cederblad run the company Sabis AB. Madeleine is the CEO, and Caroline is the chairwoman of the board. Their company has a turnover of 1.35 billion SEK and around 700 employees.
Yet they still find time to (do drugs?) play on a seesaw during work hours.
At least, that’s what @diweekend imagines.
But this isn’t new, as I said. More examples:
Photo: Magnus Gotander, Dagens Industri, 2017
1. Stena Fastigheter, one of Sweden’s largest real estate companies, was recently run by a woman (Christel Armstrong Darvik) who apparently spent most of her time swinging in a playground.
Photo: Lotte Fernvall, Aftonbladet, 2006
2. Filippa Reinfeldt, then a municipal commissioner in Täby, could often be seen sitting on a swing, shouting “I feel like a girl!” to passersby.
Something tells me it wouldn’t have been as cute if a male politician had sat in a sandbox with a bucket and spade saying, “I feel like a boy!”
Photo: Eva Tedesjö, DN, 2014
3. Filippa Reinfeldt again, now a county commissioner in Stockholm, smiling through her bangs in the spring breeze on the cover of @dnweekend. The headline: “Politics :)”
As if it were her hobby? Don’t be so serious, it’s just politics. :-)
Photo: Anette Nantell, DN, 2014. Thanks for the tip, Angela Sandberg
4. The two-time Oscar-nominated makeup artist Eva von Bahr, swinging her legs on a large, black potty (?) in DN.
Paper figure at the entrance to Ica Arvika. Tip credit: olle_kollartv
5. A cardboard cutout of a male ICA store owner giving birth to a little female ICA store owner. 😳
Okay, but are men infantilized in any context?
Yes! When it comes to health.
From Stina Backman’s dissertation The Sick Man: Popular Cultural Representations of Male Illness
In Stina Backman’s dissertation The Sick Man, she shows how ads, going back to the 1950s, portrays men with colds as whiny, helpless babies. Like in the ad for Echinagard with a man sniffling and whining:
“You girls talk about giving birth, but you have no idea what it feels like when a guy has a really bad cold. 🤧”
Commercial by Echinagard, 1994. Source: mackan912 on YouTube
I’ve actually received a fresh tip that fits this cliché:
Ad: Viterna. Thanks for the tip, @tommy_preger
A dietary supplement for men called Gladiator Blood 2.0. (Note: berry-flavored.)
Mind you, it doesn’t say the product is just for men. It could be what female CEOs are munching on to have the energy to rule their business empires and goof off for @dagensindustri photographers.
PS. The actual article in @diweekend about Madeleine Brehmer and Caroline Cederblad continues with the angle that they are powerful troublemakers: “They inherited the company from their father, acquired a hotel business in 2011, but after 14 years in leadership, they haven’t ruined the family’s life’s work.”
They are also asked: “Do you often fight?” A question I’m curious to know if male CEOs and chairmen, even when they are family, are often asked as well.
Coming Full Circle
When someone from Sweden’s Television (@svt) contacts me and asks if they can use my picture of “the man lying in the armchair” as an example – and I get the chance to tell them that it was inspired by a photo taken by them. 😂
My picture of Gävle municipality’s former communications manager, Johan Adolfsson, for my and the Swedish Institute’s exhibition/handbook Images that change the world (2019) – and the host of 50th anniversary of the Guldbagge Awards, Sissela Kyle. Photo: Carl-Johan Söder, SVT (2014).
The Bias Factory
Seven things I’ve learned from AI:
1️⃣ Three out of four professors are men. The rest are owls.
3️⃣ Nurses are thin, white women who often themselves bleed or cry. If you’re unlucky, you’ll meet one with their nose and mouth growing on the surface of their face mask. (Thanks, I’ll stay home and google the symptoms next time. 😱)
4️⃣ Everyone with a disability (an estimated 15% of the world’s population, according to the WHO) uses a wheelchair.
6️⃣ Sweden’s population is a diversity of gnomes, house-elves, blonde women, and… witch doctors?
7️⃣ Sami people have horns.*
These were the first results I got when I asked Midjourney – the internet’s most acclaimed image-generating AI – to paint a professor, a manager, a nurse, a person with a disability, a family, a Swede, and a Sami person.
And what do I want to say with this? Throw out the AI baby with the bathwater?
No. But… We can’t expect AI to be able to depict reality if we ourselves haven’t succeeded in doing so. As long as the diversity of society is not visible in news media, advertising, public communication, or commercial image banks, the AI tools will not be able to give us anything other than owls, house-elves, and unhygienically deformed nurses.
Or it could go like it did for Google’s AI Gemini. It had to be put on pause three weeks after its release because it imagined that Nazi soldiers from 1943 could have a broad representation of genders and skin colors.
Image: Google Gemini/The Verge
A glimmer of hope. When I asked Midjourney to illustrate the concept of “parental leave,” fathers were included in all four images. (Three out of four when I tried again.)
Anyone have an interesting theory as to why parental leave fathers are not just represented, but overrepresented in AI images?
NRK was the first to discover that several major image generation tools – Midjourney, Dall-e, and Leonardo.ai – believe that Sami people have horns.
Image: Leonardo.ai / @nrknyheter
The Image of Us
Why is the countryside often depicted with an image of a deserted barn (at least in Swedish news articles)? Or with overly romantic, yet equally depopulated, nature scenes?
Where are the people? Daily life? All the encounters? Innovation? Progress? Diversity? Or is all that happening in that barn? 🧐
”When we see images with people, we can relate and feel empathy. Both for the people and the places. When we see images without people, it confirms the belief that there are no people in the countryside in Sweden. Then it becomes easier to distance oneself and think that those places aren’t so important. It doesn’t matter much if they have worse conditions, are exploited, lack functioning infrastructure, or if the elderly don’t have functioning alarms.”
This is one of many perspectives highlighted in ”The Image of Us,” a handbook about challenging the urban norm. It’s published by @heimbygda, an organization that brings together about 70 local heritage associations in Jämtland and Härjedalen.
The book is completely free! You can download it at bildenavoss.se.
I contributed to the book with a visual analysis. Of a regional brochure whose cover image had a somewhat backward-looking gender perspective (a man rescuing a woman dangling from a cliff). We also discovered that none of the three images on the cover were actually taken in the region, by checking the image data. Which is the least you could ask for – from a brochure meant to mirror its region and the population living there.
#thecountryside #bildenavoss #urbannorm
Beloved Propaganda Dad
Photo: Reijo Rüster/Social Insurance Agency
It’s probably one of Sweden’s most beloved propaganda images: the Social Insurance Agency’s poster featuring weightlifter Lennart ”Hoa-Hoa” Dahlgren gently lifting a baby.
Sweden was the first in the world with a gender-neutral parental insurance.* That is, paid parental leave that wasn’t just available to mothers. However, in the year it was introduced, 1974, only 0.5% of parental leave was taken by men. By 1978, that number had crept up to 4.5%. Hence the push in the form of this inspirational image.
As a side note, it wasn’t Hoa-Hoa’s own baby. And he himself never took any parental leave. (However, the baby did, when it became a father.*)
If you’re Swedish, you’ve probably seen this picture many times before. But did you know that there’s also a film version of the campaign? I didn’t either, until @ingridamalia tipped me off!
It hasn’t aged as well as the poster.
Source: The Swedish Film Archive
The film starts with Hoa-Hoa strutting in a gigantic, square fur coat. Then he makes some kind of roided up raid on a preschool. Bellowing, he rushes into a room full of children and attacks them. They scream and overwhelm him. Hit him on the head with a stick that breaks. He contorts his face in grimaces. They scream with laughter. Finally, he throws a kid (probably not his either) over his shoulder and struts back home.
So this is supposedly how he picks up from preschool – every day. A tired toddler parent. 😅
It’s a gender cliché to portray fathers, or male preschool teachers, as playful uncle types. But it would be anachronistic to expect modern gender awareness from a campaign film from 1978. And remember: in 1978, only 4.5% of parental days were taken by men. So few even knew what a father on parental leave looked like.
That’s probably what makes the poster so timeless. That it’s so tender. Quiet. Soft. That it feels like a warm, fuzzy embrace.
Sources
1. Gender Equal Parental Leave Use in Sweden: The Success of the Reserved Months by Ann-Zofie Duvander and Sofie Cedstrand in Successful Public Policy in the Nordic: Cases, Lessons, Challenges, Oxford University Press, 2022
2. The Baby Has Had Its Own Baby, Anna Asker, SvD, 2005