This PSA titled “Newscast,” developed for UN Women’s Generation Equality campaign by San Francisco-based agency Erich & Kallman, reveals that inequality at work is not old news for women. Created for International Women’s Day (3/8), which carries an official theme this year of “I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights,” the piece features an in-camera transformation of a 1950s newscast into one from present day. Throughout the piece a newscaster presents startling facts about “the state of working women around the world.” In the end, the sobering takeaway is that these facts aren’t from a different era, rather they are true of our current world in 2020.
“The struggle for gender equality has been fought over many generations. While there has been some progress on women’s rights and empowerment, it has not been deep enough or fast enough. Not a single country in the world has achieved gender equality,” said Oisika Chakrabarti, chief of communications and advocacy a.i., UN Women. “The fact that we could still be watching the same news as our grandparents as this PSA shows, means that we simply have not seen enough progress. To bring change we need every individual, collective, organization, and country to be a game-changer. We are calling on everyone to be part of Generation Equality and to make gender equality a reality.”
“We were working with one of our clients on their International Women’s Day effort last year and looking at statistics about working women. For as much as our world talks about women’s equality, it was appalling to see the lack of real progress. We were looking at each other saying that these stats could be from the 1950s, and that’s where the idea was born.” said ad agency CCO and co-founder Eric Kallman. “Thankfully, equal pay is slowly moving from cultural conversation to actual initiatives for companies. But the bigger battle for workplace equality–fair pensions, access to well-paying STEM jobs, and mandatory maternity leave–seems to evade our collective conscience.”
The single-take video was directed by Doug Walker of Caruso Company. “We knew we had to design the choreography to be seamless. I broke the script down into sections, giving our talent and all of our stagehands key words from our script to act on,” said Walker.
