Losing Lena
Creatable and Code like a Girl
Issue 54 | March 2020
Agency
Clemenger BBDO Sydney
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Ben Coulson Executive Creative Director Paul Nagy Creative Director Brendan Willenberg Head of Creative Technology Brendan Forster Senior Copywriter Chris Pearce Senior Art Director Rowan Foxcroft Creative Dave Lidster
Production Team
Head Of Craft Daniel Mortensen Digital Design Lead Ivan So Senior Digital Designer, Developer Jay Young Front End Developer Dale Emrose Head Of Integrated Production Denise Mckeon Interactive Executive Producer Claire Bisset Editors Joe Maurici, Alex Guterres, Emily Cornelius Online Editor Jess Morgan Sound Engineer Robbie Balatincz Production Company Finch Director, Finch Kyra Bartley Media Partner Facebook Creative Strategists, Facebook Creative Shop Andy Blood, Karen Maurice-O’leary Digital & Bot Development Kamber Bot UX Design & Production Jonathon Bink Tech Platform The Bot Platform
Other Credits
CEO Nick Garrett Group Account Director Cath Bosson Senior Account Director Smaran Jworchan Communications Planner Rebecca De Beer PR (Australia) Clemenger PR PR (USA) Porter Novelli Client Code Like a Girl Founder & CEO Ally Watson Chief Marketing Officer Josephine Colson Creatable Co-Founder Greg Attwells
Date
November 2019 - ongoing
Background
In 1984, women earned 37% of degrees in computer science. By 2020 they earned just 18%.
The real problem wasn’t that women weren’t wanted in tech, it’s that they weren’t made to feel wanted. Women studying and working in tech often felt like outsiders and imposters due to male dominance and a ‘brogrammer’ culture.
There was no greater example of this bias in tech than Lena, a Playboy centrefold, who provided the test image behind almost every digital image ever seen, from Google Images to Apple iPhones.
Idea
Back in the 1970’s, some guys at the University of Southern California used Lena, a Playboy centrefold model, to test their image processing algorithms. This research laid the groundwork for the JPEG, an image standard that revolutionised our digital world.
In 2020, with complete indifference to women, Lena remained the most used test image in the world. Such was her popularity, 8,760 scientific papers using the Lena image were written in 2019 alone.
Her image has been studied in schools and universities around the world. When it used to go up on the screen, everyone laughed. Well, not everyone.
Losing Lena was an initiative to remove one image so as to make millions of women feel welcome in tech.
To affect change, an open source toolkit was created, consisting of a documentary, social videos, and an activism website.
The documentary launched on Facebook Watch. It also played in cinemas, universities and schools around the world, with live panel discussions, to inspire change.
Lena, in her late 60’s, joined the campaign, asking the tech industry to retire her image.
Results
So far, the documentary has been seen by millions. Tens of thousands of people have signed the petition on the activism website.
Hundreds of leading universities and tech companies have committed to stop using Lena. And more are joining every week.
Our Thoughts
I learned a lot from this campaign – about the fascinating history of the JPEG and about the depressing hypocrisy of the tech industry, which, if it wants to change the world should start with itself.
This is about the past and the present. An embarrassing past in which the November 1972 edition of Playboy sold over seven million copies. (Incidentally, that’s the magazine in which Lena appeared.) And it’s about the embarrassing present, in which discrimination against women is still prevalent – in creative departments of ad agencies as well as in digital engineering.
Thanks to people like Ally Watson, who is shaming her industry into change (and Ali Hanan who founded Creative Equals in the UK) the future looks more positive.