As we continue to talk about the trend of inequality amongst the genders, we see an incident arising in the last week or so about the furniture company IKEA which is based in Sweden. IKEA ended up Photoshopping women out of their catalog pictures for the catalog that was issued in Saudi Arabia. The company took every single woman out of the pictures that were displayed in the catalog in an effort to apparently appease a country where women have little rights. It is no secret that Saudi Arabia restricts rights to women that other countries guarantee. However, IKEA which is a company based in Sweden has in essence promoted gendered inequality by Photoshopping these women out. It has caused much public outcry due to the images going viral on the internet. IKEA has since apologized for Photoshopping the women out of the catalog for Saudi Arabia. Even so, the damage has been done and it has appeared that IKEA has bowed down to conservative laws that are in place over in Saudi Arabia in an attempt to preserve business.
The actions by IKEA are rather disturbing and upsetting. Coming from a country where equality is forefront, these actions contradict everything that the country stands for. Not only that, but it is blatantly showing that the company values revenue more than equality and in fact promotes inequality amongst the genders to gain this revenue. Even though IKEA has apologized for the catalog differences, they certainly have a long way to go to repair their public image with many individuals. Inequality for the sake of appeasing potential buyers should not be supported in any situation. Ideally IKEA has learned from this and will try to make up for it's mistakes.
October 5, 2012 4:00pm
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/ikea-apologizes-for-removing-women-from-saudi-catalog/
No comments:
Post a Comment