This evening I was on the train home from work, randomly reading tweets and posting pointless thoughts about not a lot, when a friend of mine, @Ki_Shah, posted a very excellent blog post, commenting on the European Commission's latest attempt to encourage women into science.
Now, I'm not often surprised by idiocy. I don't often take personal offence at things I find on the internet. But when I saw the video that the European Commission had come up with to promote the science industry to women, I was immediately torn between wanting to tear my own eyes out, or stab the nearest person to me. (Fortunately for the little old lady in the seat beside me, I refrained from both.)
Here is the offending video.
[Note: Unfortunately since all the negative publicity, somebody has decided to take the original Youtube video down. Thank goodness somebody had the good sense to mirror it... ;) ]
In summary, it's a sickening tidal wave of garish colours, slick graphics and damaging gender stereotypes. It starts with a trio of typically 'TV-hot' girls in short skirts and stilettos strutting towards camera; they come into shot and strike a pose Charlie's Angels-style for the benefit of a bemused-looking male model/scientist. So far we're just as confused as he is. What could these women possibly want?
Well apparently, what they want is to mug for the camera, showing off a range of catalogue poses (both lit and in silhouette) which are intercut with technicolor images of make up brushes, lipsticks and test-tube racks. It comes across like a hideous crossover between a United Colours of Benetton ad and the opening to a James Bond movie, all filmed in the local branch of Boots.
When the ladies are finally all pouted out, they line up to put on pairs of designer lab goggles. Suddenly it clicks: these women are doing science! They're scientists!
At this point I turned my smartphone off and quietly started banging my head on the seat in front of me.
The problems with this video are manifold. Firstly there is the sheer clumsiness of the thing; a sledgehammer embossed with the words "science is good" and applied directly to the forehead would have more finesse than this video. Then there's the use of all the old familiar female stereotypes that are used to sell things all over the world: mini-skirts, airbrushed faces and simpering laughter that says "we're all having fun" and makes me die a little inside.
But these are only the tip of this odious advertising iceberg. Far worse is the way that it trivialises the very subject that it is trying to promote. "Do science - you too can learn how mascara is made!"
This does a disservice to both subject and target: science suffers from having its great wonders and infinite intricacies dumbed down to the contents of somebody's make-up case, and women suffer the demeaning humiliation of being talked down to like a particularly slow toddler.
It beggars belief that from the advert being pitched, through tone meetings, storyboarding, filming and editing, nobody noticed the marked irony of trying to encourage women to embark on a journey into science, a career populated by some of the greatest minds in the history of humankind, by reducing it to the lowest common intellectual denominator. There's an intrinsic lack of logic here: the science industry, by definition, needs to be attracting the best and brightest, but the European Commission is pitching their advert to the cast of TOWIE.
This is a situation where joined-up thinking was required, but instead we got paint by numbers. The advert is cheap, banal rubbish that demeans science, demeans women, and completely misses the point it was trying to make in the first place. All it's succeeded in doing is embarrassing the public body from which it came, and rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. On the plus side, the internet seems to already be having fun with it, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of creative and hilarious re-hashes doing the rounds in the days and weeks to come.
So at least something intelligent will have come out of this sorry little debacle.
