For International Women’s Day, Women's Shelters Canada (WSC), LG2 and PR agency alinea, have launched "Crickets," a campaign combating online sexism.
Central to the campaign is the cricket emoji, which WSC has repurposed as a tool for halting sexist humor in its tracks. “We wanted to create a symbol that regular guys could use to tell their fellow men that sexist jokes aren't funny and discourage trolls from contaminating online spaces with misogynistic tropes and stereotypes,” said LG2 executive creative director, Nick Paget, in a release.
Crickets is starting on social media, with a dedicated Instagram account @cricketclapback, and creator content from partnering influencers. It will be supported by a 15-second TV spot in English and French airing March 11 and running for four weeks, as well as OOH and digital banner ads that explain how people can use the cricket emoji in response to sexism online, with redirects to cricketclapback.ca for more information.
The insight is based on the escalation pattern of gender-based violence, which WSC illustrates as a pyramid. “Sexist, homophobic, and transphobic jokes, problematic language and objectification” are the lowest level but only three tiers away from harassment “threats and verbal abuse”, and six away from “murder.”
WSC says to stop this language from escalating, it needs to be called out but a recent survey conducted by Leger on behalf of the organization revealed that 78% of Canadian men don't always feel comfortable calling out sexist comments and jokes they encounter on social media.
“Gender-based violence is rooted in attitudes and beliefs that are normalized through sexist jokes,” said WSC director of communications, development, and grants, Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, in a release. “It's crucial for men to recognize their role in challenging these harmful behaviours and promoting a safer online environment for everyone.”
That’s why WSC is giving men a subtler option, and leading with numerous demonstrations. To populate the social media account, LG2 used consumer intelligence platform Brandwatch to develop a web crawler that identifies misogynistic jokes and comments.
The query looks for common sexist joke structures and common derogatory words, and takes into account attributes like the proximity of certain words to each other, sources, the presence or absence of emojis, and country of origin.
For the purpose of the campaign, they sought social posts that are mildly sexist or have sexist undertones, but also are intended to be humorous. The posts were then shared on @cricketclapback, with a cricket emoji reply implying “that’s not funny.”
"A good example of what we were looking for is jokes similar to "you 
drive like a woman or a girl,” LG2 creative director, Joannie Fredette, told Campaign. “We particularly were not looking for serious misogynistic comments because we didn't see any room for conversation with individuals perpetrating blatant hate. The intention was to find ‘casual’ sexism which people often laugh off.”
Partnering influencers Canadian rapper Classified, Professor Neil,
Brian Herzog, and Mark Gaetano, are sharing educational content about the significance of men speaking to other men and how to use crickets to combat sexism. Collectively, 158 posts on X, Facebook and Reddit have been replied to with crickets so far.
“We chose these male influencers because they are popular among
our target age range of men 18-45, have a significant presence in Canada, and have existing profiles as allies,” explained Fredette. “We especially targeted content creators who specialized in humour to be leaders in what is funny and isn't. All of them have spoken about women's rights and equality in the past in one form or another.”
