Produced against a backdrop of political movements, cultural shifts and major sporting events, much of this year’s shortlisted and winning work seeks to address gaps in knowledge, revise historical narratives and address policy where the needs, perspectives or voices of women have been previously overlooked and underrepresented.

A publishing trend in recent years is books that help fill gaps in women’s history, from Zing Tsjeng’s Forgotten Women series (2018) to Phaidon’s Great Women Artists (2019). One area where women’s perspectives and achievements have been most underrepresented is in the textbooks children learn from at school. White Pencil-winner Lessons in Herstory by Goodby Silverstein & Partners helped to revise a popular middle school US history textbook to illuminate stories of women that had been left out. Using an augmented reality app, users can scan any portrait of any man in the book to unlock a story about a woman in history.

When the 2019 economic crisis in Lebanon led to a series of protests that became known as the October Revolution, a campaign that reframed national history brought in the previously unrepresented perspectives of women. In a country where women are underrepresented in politics, do not have equal rights and are not mentioned in the national anthem, The New National Anthem Edition was created by the nation’s leading newspaper An Nahar in partnership with agency Impact BBDO Dubai to help encourage a more inclusive and peaceful revolution.

The galvanising campaign utilised mass media to reach a broad audience; the national anthem was rewritten and projected onto the newspaper’s building, and was featured on the front page of an edition of the newspaper entirely dedicated to women. The revised anthem, which now included the voices of female citizens, became the chant of the movement and the campaign gained international media coverage. The movement resulted in an increase in female ministers and members of the new cabinet also pledged to submit a bill to make the revisions to the national anthem permanent.

When VMLY&R and Gazeta.pl purchased one of Poland's longest-running adult magazines, it brought the female perspective into a space where the narrative had previously been driven by the male gaze. They flipped the script by making The Last Ever Issue of the magazine Twój Weekend the start of a new national conversation around sex education, gender portrayal, equal rights and sexism, particularly impactful in a country with a lack of formal sex education.

The implications of catering to the lived experiences of women are real, particularly for some especially vulnerable groups. Voiceless Women by agencies Uitch Iscratch and No Sleep for NGO NEWLIVES shocked and raised awareness by shining a light on the world of closed forums on the dark web, where men share reviews of sexual encounters with trafficked women. The work repurposed actual reviews and had real sex workers lip-sync them, exposing the real usernames of the reviewers in the process.

The stigma and silence around menstruation speaks to the dominance of the cis male perspective across society. This has come to the fore in different ways in culture in recent years – from the release of the ‘period’ emoji in 2019’s Apple updates to the short movie Period. End of Sentence winning an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 2019 – and initiatives to redress the balance and break taboos have been common. Upon accepting the reward director and producer Rayka Zehtabchi told The Hollywood Reporter, "There's millions of stories about menstruation, and I just think that we need to hear women's voices and we need to learn about their experiences.”

After winning the Women’s Football World Cup in July 2019, the US Women’s National Team turned their attention back to their off-the-field ambitions of gaining equal pay to that of their male counterparts for work of equal value. A gender discrimination lawsuit, filed before the tournament, dominated news cycles throughout 2019. In this context and with many other female athletes fighting a battle for equality and an end to the gendered salary gap, Droga5 created The Long Fight / Gender Gap for the New York Times, using 50 years of archival headlines to show the female fight to level the playing field.

When strategic media buys and creative thinking seek to flip the dominant voice, the work can go beyond tokenism to directly address previously uncatered for audiences. What stories can be uncovered and what does the media look like if this thinking is applied to other groups outside the dominant perspective?

Theme Report by Neighbourhood, commissioned and edited by D&AD for the 2020 D&AD digital Annual.