Can the feminine mystique really be captured in just one video? The answer is no, so for International Women's Day, Google instead came up with a fun doodle and a video showing women from around the world, in a very positive light.
The video is on the Google homepage, and is a minute and 20 seconds long. The team that created it is made up of six men and five women, and they spent three months on the project. The video showcases over 100 women from all over the world, both real and fictional, and spans a wide range of fields, from world leaders and activists, to community groups.
These women greeted the world "Happy International Women's Day," in their own languages. Among them were Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, Thai TV host and IT goddess Cee Chatpawee, Slovenian singer Alenka Godec, Moldova's minister of education, Maia Sandu, British businesswoman and charity worker Camila Batmanghelidjh, and Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Also in the video was the President of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaitė. The full list of women in the video is on Google's page created especially for the occasion.
The video edited by Morgan Stiff and was set to the music of Zap Mama, a Belgian Congoloese vocal group. The doodle features 27 wriggling chromosomes -- 26 small ones and a giant one that contains the button to play the video. The doodle was created by Google's doodle team, led by Ryan Germick, who admitted that his team did not have an easy time coming up with the doodle.
"International Women's Day is a really hard topic. How do you surmise what women represent in a graphic?" IWD has been around since the early 1900s, and it left the doodlers wondering, how do you pay homage to such a crucial day?" he said.
This is first time Google featured an animation to celebrate International Women's Day. In the past years, the Google home pages for International Women's Day just showed showed artwork that was static. Google doodler Liat Ben Rafael, whose niece is also in the video, said they wanted to video to be universal.
"When we first brainstormed IWD we were thinking about what was truly international," said Rafael. "We thought bringing real people into the doodle is the best thing to do. It's the first time ever we have brought real people into the doodle. We have students from Nigeria and Guatemala. We see them as inspiring in their way but they are not necessarily famous."
The first International Women's Day was observed in the United States on February 28, 1909. The era was characterized by population boom and the rise of radical ideologies. In 1910, during an international conference on women's rights in Copenhagen, Clara Zetkin, a German Social Democrat, tabled the idea of an International Women's Day. Many countries celebrate this day in their own way. In the UK, BBC Radio 1 banishes male presenters for 39 hours in honor of International Women's Day.
