What Google Tells Us About Boys

As with any new business initiative nowadays, the list of digital start-up tasks can seem never-ending. Establishing a new online presence in today's digital environment takes a lot of work. It was about a month and a half ago when I was putting the finishing design touches on one of our new program offerings. I needed of one or two really good images to help visually convey one of the group programs we are offering. So what do you do if you find yourself in need of something with a keyboard at your fingertips? You got it....Goggle!

What was to be a 30-second image grab off of Google turned into a heart-wrenching admission that if the Internet, and by extension Google, is simply a reflection of what we as society contribute to it, we have a lot of work to do!

Here is the Google image search results I received for "young boys emotions group":

My first reaction was the cross-section between surprise, shock, dismay, and the feeling you have when you realize your once optimistic view of the world may just have been stolen from you forever. Image after image showed boys in varying emotions of sadness, anger, and rage. Each image has nothing positive to relate in terms of "young boys", "emotions" or "groups" let alone a combination of all three. This is what google tells us about boys.

Google indexes billions of web pages that we create so that others can search for the information. Search results are simply snippets of content from what we have created ourselves. But even knowing this, I found it hard that such a combination of keywords would generate such results.

When did the word pairing of "young boys" and "emotions" suddenly equate to expressions made up of such darkness and negativity? Why not the exact opposite? 

In the absence of having an immediate answer, I decided to Google, the exact same keywords, except instead of BOYS, I searched on GIRLS. Here is the Google image search results I received for "young girls emotions group":

The above search results displayed images almost exclusively of girls in various states of happiness in amongst other girls.

The contrast is devastating. A simple gender change in a search term can derive such a drastically different set of results! Young boys as raging emotional beings or girls blissfully happy?

Given that rather extremely simple categorization, I decided to break it down into simple comparisons of the nearly exact search with the only difference being the gender identification.

The above speaks pretty clearly (even given the small sample set) and if it is to be interpreted at face value, what is says is striking. The above speaks pretty clearly (even given the small sample set) and if it is to be interpreted at face value, what is says is devastating.   

• Boys experience positive emotions at a fraction of what girls experience.

• Boys almost exclusively do not experience positive emotions with the same sex, while girls exclusively do.

• Girls experience positive physical contact from their gender peers, while boys do not - unless it is a parental figure.

• In instances where boys were depicted showing positive emotions, almost exclusively a girl was situated either with or between boys.

• Boys were displayed as showing negative emotions 7x more than girls.

• For both genders, the number of images displaying negative emotions equated the the same number they were depicted by themselves alone.

The above observations are far from scientific. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the obvious. We as a society portray young boys in a severely negative light when in comes to emotions and depict young girls in almost to the same extreme, but positively. Remember, Google is just a mirror - it only serves back to us what it finds from what we have published on the Internet.

The below illustrates this further. For boys, the search results either display boys with extreme aggression or with a female subject positioned between boys. For girls, the search results mostly display closeness between females in a very positive way.

So how does all of this come to be? How do we see boys as it relates to feelings and emotions? Do we believe that emotions are gender specific and not human-specific? Are we as a society reinforcing the stigma that boys are not compassionate, empathic beings to the same degree as their gender counterparts? Or are the images just a simple reflection of what society cares to focus on and not focus on?

As I scrolled through the search results, the stark disparity between how emotions are portrayed based solely on gender became irrefutably evident. This unintentional experiment with Google’s image search left me pondering the insidious influence of societal perceptions on our understanding of boys' emotional lives. It's a disturbing realization that our digital footprint reflects a narrative steeped in the bias that boys are either consumed by anger or melancholy, while girls revel in supportive, joyful connections. The question that lingered was not just about the search results but about the profound societal implications ingrained within them.

These search results are not just pixels on a screen; they mirror the skewed lens through which society often views boys’ emotional landscapes. It's a societal conditioning that dictates what is portrayed and what remains unseen, perhaps inadvertently perpetuating stereotypes. The question then becomes not just about how emotions are depicted but also how these depictions shape our perceptions. Ultimately, it’s a call to recalibrate our collective understanding of emotions, challenging the stereotypes that hinder our boys' emotional expression and underscoring the need for a more balanced portrayal that embraces the full spectrum of emotional experiences for all genders