Even though was highly critiqued, the Brazilian campaign was also fully glorified. It comes in the empowering women context where “equal rights should start with equal voices”. “The agency - BETC Sao Paulo - created the app after coming across a 2014 George Washington University study that found women get interrupted more than men,” explains AdWeek‘s Katie Richards. But in a recent interview, BETC Sao Paolo reckons it is an app inspired by president Donald Trump’s 51 interruptions of Hillary Clinton during the first presidential debate.
“Woman Interrupted” is an app that counts how many times a woman is interrupted by a man in a conversation. It was created by BETC Sao Paulo and released on International Women’s Day. Its goal: to promote “equal rights” through “equal voices” by reducing “manterrupting.” The term describes the moment when men interrupt women. This behavior is seen as a setback for women. They are stopped from expressing their ideas at work, at home, and in society.
“The objective of the Woman Interrupted App is to generate awareness and more debate around Manterrupting, one of the many kinds of violence against women,” Gal Barradas, the founder and co-CEO of BETC São Paulo.
Voice recognition is the main mechanism. Woman Interrupted App uses the smartphone to detect and help reduce Manterrupting. It’s necessary to allow the app to use the microphone on your device. The ‘Women Interrupted’ app, available on iOS and Android, is able to track the frequencies of recorded voices and establish how many times voices interfered and women are talked over. Once this has been counted, the user receives a customized diagram with their results, ready to be shared on social media. The conversations are not recorded through the app. Everything goes directly from sound to data, by sampling analyzing the voices and not recording them.
The app can be used by men too. Promoting the idea of equality, men can make use of the app too, and find out if they are in situating of Manterruption. Maybe without even realizing it.
Global Manterruption map
The app also counts globally the interruptions, based on the logged users’ experiences. Starting from this calculation, it can begin to paint a picture of where in the world this interruption problem is the most severe. Barradas says that “BETC plans to launch a Global Dashboard that will present an overview of the data collected around the world, in real time. In this dashboard, users will be able to find information such as the number of interruptions per minute and per country.”
The campaign generated empowering reactions on the AppStore review fields.
Building upon this, a website was also created offering stats and stories around interruption.
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