Advertisers Rally Behind Women As The 'SHE-Cession' Crisis Intensifies

When Burger King made a major misfire on International Women’s Day this week, tweeting the phrase “women belong in the kitchen,” social media lit up with furious women.

The actual tweet, by Burger King U.K., was part of a campaign meant to promote scholarships for culinary education for women, and it was only in subsequent tweets that the intended meaning was explained. But the incandescent reaction serves only to highlight that the issue of women's household roles is a tinder box.

Warning signs were already there. In January, a coronavirus-themed digital campaign by the U.K. government also provoked fury. The social media ad, with the tagline "Stay home, save lives," shown here by The Guardian, featured an illustration of four small houses. In three of them, female stick figures were depicted homeschooling, cleaning and ironing. In the other house, a man was pictured sitting on a sofa with a woman and child. The image went viral and was later pulled amid complaints of misogyny.

Women around the world are expressing rage and frustration after months in a pandemic that has threatened to derail their progress and has sparked the so-called “she-cession,” a term coined by C. Nicole Mason, president and chief executive of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). “Women are at this boiling point with how they’ve been treated,” says Berlin Cameron President Jennifer DaSilva, who recently worked on campaign for beauty brand No7 addressing the issue.