Gender, Art, and Advertising: "Fearless Girl"

Fearless Girl

On March 7, 2017, a statue of a girl was installed in Bowling Green in the Financial District of Manhattan. The statue, called Fearless Girl, was created by Kristen Visbal and installed by State Street Global Advisors as part of an advertising campaign engineered by McCann New York to coincide with International Women's Day.  According to State Street, the statue is intended to highlight the need for gender diversity in Wall Street and workplaces as a whole. The statue originally featured an accompanying plaque, which told observers to "know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference."

Fearless Girl and Charging Bull

The statue itself, according to Visbal, is actually based on two girls, including a Latina girl, highlighting Visbal's stated efforts to create something that everyone can relate to. Visbal has also claimed that she made sure to keep the statue's features "soft." Visbal intended to portray the girl as brave, proud, and strong, not belligerent or defiant. The statue's pose is different to the objectifying, weak poses that we examined in class, as the statue is posed as a powerful figure standing up to Arturo Di Modica's Charging Bull.

Young girls and women of all ages have taken photographs of the statue and have posed with it since it was installed. As shown in the tweets featured in the article, some people on social media sites like Twitter have praised Fearless Girl as a feminist symbol. Some people view the statue as something that extends beyond something that stands up to the gender gap in Wall Street, viewing it as something that empowers women in society as a whole. The statue was so popular among both New York citizens and tourists that its stay on Bowling Green was extended to March 2018. The current Public Advocate of New York City, Letitia James, has called for the statue to become a permanent fixture, as have others.

Others, however, have been far more critical of the statue. As noted earlier, Fearless Girl was originally devised as part of a marketing campaign by McCann New York for State Street, which calls the intentions behind the statue into question. Jillian Steinhauer refers to the statue as an example of corporate feminism in an article for Brooklyn-based art organization Hyperallergic. Steinhauer points out that the Board of Directors of State Street Global Advisors features more men than it does women. Emily Peck, writing for Huffington Post, also points out that less than one-quarter of State Street’s executive vice-presidents are women, and that only 30% of the company's new hires in 2016 were female. Both Peck and Steinhauer suggest that Fearless Girl's message stands at odds with what the company is actually doing in regard to women in the workplace, and that State Street is attempting to make people feel good about Wall Street despite its shady past.

The plaque included with Fearless Girl is especially notable for this argument. "SHE" refers to the statue itself as well as State Street's Gender Diversity Index, an exchange traded fund which uses SHE as a ticker symbol. While the latter meaning is potentially lost on many of the statute's visitors, the statue was originally intended to be a subtle advertisement. The plaque was removed in early April and replaced with a different plaque which omits references to the company's fund.

Fearless Girl can be seen as an example of corporate feminism which attempts to co-opt the message behind feminism, similar to Dove's various postfeminist campaigns as noted by Dara Murray's "Branding "Real" Social Change in Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty." Unlike the situation with Dove, it should be noted that the statue itself, as a piece of art, can still potentially be viewed as a pseudo-positive symbol despite its origins, as demonstrated by the positive empowerment it's already provided for young girls. It's possible that public perception of the work of art has transcended its corporate marketing origins, though people should still be mindful of those origins.