Activating Equal Play

genEquality's mission is to creatively activate gender-equal and inclusive beliefs and behaviors. Our legacy Equal Play Equal Pay program revolved around community organizing, but was missing the creative element. Our strength lies in our creative approach, so we asked ourselves: How could we creatively activate people around equality in sport?

Enter the reimagined Equal Play: a data visualization initiative that aims to shift beliefs and behaviors through awareness and inspiration.

The initiative will run design sprints and Calls for Art to illustrate research data points about inequality in sport in new and creative ways. The resulting data visualizations and illustrations help connect research to practice by making this data and knowledge more creatively accessible and easily digestible. Learn more here.

We kicked off the inaugural Equal Play design sprint with students at the Kansas City Art Institute in February with creative director and KCAI professor, Lisa Maione. As part of our partnership with Lamar, the students' completed illustrations have been displayed on digital billboards around Kansas City throughout March. As of March 23, the Equal Play data visualizations had 1.86 MILLION impressions! 

Here’s what some KCAI students had to say about their process and experience:

“I began to read through the statistics which were provided by genEquality, I figured out that the [design] did not need complex text or graphs, but that a simple image paired with the data to communicate the importance of this gap was sufficient. The financial obstacles women face even now seem so unreal to me. I decided to pick two data sets, one the amount of teams in the MLB compared to the National Softball teams because the numbers were so unbalanced it needed no further explanation. The second set was on Women’s Athletic Scholarships [Colleges spend only 24% of their total athletic operations budgets on female sports activities.]. To think that even while studying for degrees women athletes were competing for such a small percentage of the scholarships but, when graduated they would be met with receiving less for their studies compared to males. This [exercise] made me understand how important both designing for change and camaraderie really is. The only way we can tilt such an unbalanced system is to work together and spread the truth.” - Egil, KCAI Graphic Design student

“During our collaboration, we had insightful conversations to explore various visual experimentations to better address these issues and it was truly wonderful to have the opportunity to contribute and share the insights.” - Joseph, KCAI Graphic Design student