Man Tears – A satirical app that closes the gender gap in emotivity.

It was September 2016 and everyone talked about the gender gap. Do you know what men who attend a hackathon don’t want to hear about? Gender gaps. Over 70% of the hackathon participants were men who worked in tech, an industry where at the time women were underrepresented and underfunded. Men in tech considered themselves progressive. Because of this, they were reluctant to accept the possibility that women who worked in tech dealt with deep-seated, structural sexism. But we’d been selected for a prestigious comedy hackathon where the task was to develop apps that tackled large structural problems like racism or sexism. So… I decided to show men what it’s like when someone pays attention to an inequality that affected them. (You read the dot, dot, dot in the ellipsis, didn’t you?)

THE PROBLEM

Men cry four times less than women do. The implications of this fact are far-reaching but my goal was to highlight how this affects women in the workplace (especially the few women who worked in tech). Eventually, the news of the project made it to the Dutch scientist whose research on men crying I’ve used to kickstart the project.

THE IDEA

Make a health and fitness web app to help men cry more in order to close the “gender crying gap.”  Tapped into the insight that men were avid users of fitness apps. I positioned crying as a health & wellness workout where men were underperforming. Emphasized the benefits of crying backed by science: cleansing the eyeballs, and eliminating stress hormones like adrenaline. My team then created a workout tracking app where men could set a goal and track “crying sessions.” Users would first set a monthly crying goal that was calculated in minutes of watching a tear-jerker video. Then they would choose a speed: a normal cry or a power cry for those who were on a tight schedule. The app allowed men to select a YouTube video from categories such as “Military families return home” “Business deals that fell through the cracks at the last moment” and “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” By keeping things humorous, we managed to generate conversations on a topic that would have been discounted as boring or too heavy.

GOAL

Raise awareness about the wide-ranging implications of the gender gap in emotivity. Inspired by the notion of a “gender gap” that was widely covered by the media during the 2016 presidential campaign. The project was developed during the NYC Comedy Hack Day hackathon, a weekend-long event that brings together developers, designers, writers, and comedians to develop technology that addresses social issues such as sexism, racism, or bullying.  My idea was one of the 22 selected for execution (out of 90+ pitched). The concept, tagline (“For crying out loud”), writing, and UX strategy are mine. I was interviewed by MEL magazine, Glamour US, featured on the official Dollar Shave Club accounts and in a Het Parool article about men emotivity.

Role:  Concept, Writer, Producer

We also created a Twitter account featuring images of famous men crying as well as quotes by men about crying.