Gender in Advertising Images: The Devil is in the Detail

My Saturday was unbalanced already at breakfast, while reading the Economist and drinking my orange juice. On page 67 of the August 25-31, 2012 issue, I discovered that TU Delft is recruiting a Professor of Safety Science (good news!). Unfortunately, whoever designed this ad has made some unconventional decisions (not such good news).

The most obvious "bug" is the choice to include in the advertisement an image of a person. Since this misstep is a useful illustration of the limitations of visual depictions in multimedia, I decided to dedicate a blogpost to discussing it.

At first consideration, it seems obvious that our university should advertise using image of people. One of the reasons that I love working at TU Delft is the emphasis on solving societal problems. Using pictures containing people and not just technology wherever possible seems to be a good strategy for getting the importance of our work to address human and social challenges across.

However, a major limitation for visual depictions such as images and videos is "the curse of instance  depiction". Basically, it is impossible to create such visual imagery without committing yourself to depicting a full range of details. You can't get across and abstract concept, for example, "car" without actually committing yourself to an instance of a single car existing in the real world, which you take to stand for all cars. Instead, you are going to need to show in your image a specific type, make and model.

Here, the concept that the ad is trying to convey is "professor". The "type, make and model" chosen to convey this concept are an adult of a certain gender and a certain age group, wearing glasses. It seems plausible that the person designing the ad was aware of the problem of instance depiction. The decision to use a model with a shaved head makes it possible to avoid depicting the hair color, which could serve to further specify the ethnic background or the age.

However, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to "hedge" on the gender question in images of the real world. A person depicted in a daytime work setting will generally be identifiable as a male person or a female person.

If we assume that the process by which we choose and interpret images that are being used to represent categories follows prototype theory, then the choice of a male to represent a TU Delft professor is no just unbalancing for the reader of the advertisement, but is very serious indeed. Prototype theory tells us that in our cognitive representations, some members of conceptual categories are more salient than others. We think of them first when we think of a category and we react to them more quickly when confirming category membership.

The use of a male person in this advertisement sends the message that males are the canonical professors at the TU Delft. Although men are clearly in the majority in the faculty, there is not any sort of a conscious intention at the university to keep the situation that way. In fact, I have the impression that everyone is working to shift their idea of how can be a professor to encompass a diverse demographic more directly representative of the general population.

Visual depictions in multimedia, i.e., images depicting the real world, are limited in what they can express because they deprive us of the possibilities of leaving certain details unpecified. What we have is a reversal of the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words." Instead, the spoken or the written word is able to express more in this case because human language can directly convey concepts without having to make use of specific instances to do so. In effect, the possibility for ambiguity or underspecification is makes human language more expressive that multimedia.

And so, the saying "The devil is in the detail" takes on a new shade of meaning.

What to do about the advertisement? I advise having a closer look at some advertising guidelines. Advertising Standards Canada, a non-profit self-regulation body for advertising, has a helpful list of guidelines for balancing gender representations in advertising online and surely Europe has a similar set of guidelines.

An "quick and dirty" solution is to look to see how other universities advertise. In the Economist, a general tendency to avoid imagery is readily apparent. For example, next to the TU Delft advertisement is a classical advertisement for Harvard faculty positions, whose only graphic content in the Harvard Business School logo.

I was cheered up again when my Google Googles app confirmed for me that the logo used was from the business school (i.e., distinct from the main Harvard Logo). It is my first use of Google Goggles for something other than just playing around with while hanging out with my multimedia information retrieval colleagues.

For completeness, I note a less obvious bug. The advertisement contains the text "Maximum employment: 38 hours per week (1 FTE)" In order to interpret this text, you need to know that "FTE" stands for "full time equivalent". 1 FTE means this position is a full time job. Contrary to what the text implies, no one the Safety Science processor to working 38 hours a week.

Tagging Love and Affection: Part II

Perhaps even the more interesting thing about the wedding in terms of modern media was the interaction between the professional photographers and the wedding guests who were taking pictures. It seemed like these were two completely different activities in terms of the results that they were aiming to produce. The photographers created an amazing album of storybook moments -- and the guests -- well, speaking for myself at least -- took pictures of people as people that they knew.

The professional photos actually included shots of members of the bridal party and guests photographing the bride and groom and each other. There was a particular dramatic one of the best man from the back taking a picture of the groom and you can see the groom twice: once over the shoulder of the best man in the display of his cell phone and once sitting as the main subject of the image.

There is another one in which one of the bridesmaids is taking a picture of the newly weds. It's like this act of greeting, an 'I was there with you in your moment of bliss and I was so so happy for you.' Taking a picture is like smiling, waving or winking at someone -- except that it is asynchronous, delayed in time. From the past, a shout out, "Congratulations!"

I was struck how the professional photographers were able to use the act of photo-taking as a way to depict the love and affection between friends and family members. Its not just the places that we tag with our photos, as I've discussed in a previous blog post, but its people, too.

And this is where the difference between the professional photographers and the guests really became apparent. I was using the little camera of my mom, so my pictures of the wedding are not qualitatively speaking very good. It would probably take some improvement of my photographic skills and not just a better camera to get high quality pictures.

But there was something that struck us about them. I naturally looked for the people in our family who we see in frequently and took pictures of people talking that only get to see each other once every several years -- if at all. I took pictures of people holding the youngest baby in our extended family -- that capture the moment that generations within the extended family meet for the first time. I took pictures that showed siblings engrossed in conversations with each other -- showing how the intensity of how we speak and how we listen. The photographers didn't know us and although the wedding pictures were beautiful, aesthetically not to be surpassed, we really love to look at the personal pictures, because they are somehow more "us".

Maybe the "real" pictures are the pictures that we take that mark love and affection. They encode our personalities, our common past and our hope for the future.

The implications are quite large for the field of multimedia retrieval, as revealed by the following line of reasoning: Life is finite. We only live so long and can support close relationships with so many people. If Dunbar is right it is a very limited number indeed. If we take photos at particular moments, such as moments of expression of affection that I am describing here, then the number of total pictures that we take is also limited. If we keep on insisting that our multimedia retrieval algorithms must be able to handle millions and millions of photos, then we run the danger of missing out on developing important techniques. Multimedia algorithms developed for relatively small numbers of photos can afford to be computationally more complex. If we ignore the "small set" problem, we run the danger of not developing the best possible algorithms to personal multimedia retrieval challenges.

As final comment, I can add that during the wedding I was already challenged by an image retrieval problem. I took maybe 200 photos. I wanted to show a special photo of my mom -- taken a few minutes back -- to the cousins I was sitting with at the dinner table. It took me so long to flip through the index to find those photos on that small screen. Very disruptive for dinner conversation.

I had the idea that I was the one that should have been wearing the GSR sensor. I am sure that my affective peak was physiologically measurable when I took the picture of my mom, saw it on my camera display for the first time and realized I had gotten a once-in-a-lifetime shot. If my camera display could take me right to peak pictures, it could be a much more functional device: transcending a capture to also support storytelling as well.

On second thought skip the GSR. I'm sure I jumped up and down. The accelerometer on a mobile phone could have picked that up. If all else fails, make a photo taking app that encourages me to shake the thing when I notice I like a picture. Better stop blogging and start implementing.