Women at work

Professional women at work

I’ve blogged about images before on this blog and so when I read Danny Golding’s post  regarding the trouble he was having finding suitable images for his new enterprise (Work Out Loud). The post got me thinking.

His post is primarily about how all of the available pictures are overly stylised pictures of young suited men. He goes on to explain there are very few photos available of working women, just lots of suits.  

Asi get most of my images from Wiki commons I thought I’d check what their selection of Working Women looked like, and it seems the view of the open media community is just as stereotypical. Here's the wiki commons page for when you search “Women at work”

The first thing I noticed was the categorisation which included

•  “Men and women at work” - Which would be ok if there were also suitable categories of “women at work”, but with the others it appears to define working women as only possible alongside men.
• Peasant women – So peasant women have to do some manual work or bake bread, but surely paid employment is not possible?
• Bikini Car Wash – Which bizarrely implies that one of the most popular jobs for women is to wash men’s cars with very little clothes on.
• Working mothers – so those that aren't defined by men, undertaking manual tasks or washing men’s cars are only working because their mothers.

The picture that come up in the first place are mostly historical black and white pictures which is not uncommon for Wiki commons but does give the impression that women used to work but that no modem women has a job worth photographing.  Filter the historical pictures we’re back to manual tasks and bikini’s. There are also a number of photos of women in uniform, police, flight attendants, nurses, ect ect, and whilst that’s all fine and dandy I can’t believe it proportional to the jobs that women actually undertake.

But now there is something you can do to redress the balance, Wiki commons is an open community so if you have more appropriate images of women at work why not upload them to commons.wikimedia.org