Elle's #MoreWomen Video Shows Just How Few Women Are At The Top... In Any Industry

This Is What Happens When You Photoshop All The Men Out Of Politics

This video shows how rare it is for women to be leaders on the world stage - by cutting out all the men.

The film photoshops out men from pictures of groups of leaders in politics, business, entertainment and the media, revealing that the women left behind often look rather lonely.

The treatment is applied to photos from political boardrooms, the UN and Buckingham Palace, as well as the BBC's Question Time, Saturday Night Live, Masterchef and even University Challenge.

The UK parliament would be a drafty place if it replied only on women MPs, as the contrast between these pictures starkly reveals:

The pictures aim to highlight how powerful and influential women often stand alone in their field, as part of the Elle magazine #MoreWomen campaign calling for more women at the top.

Emma Watson is the only woman left in a picture from the UN:

While German chancellor Angela Merkel is alone after all the male leaders are removed from one picture:

Hilary Clinton hasn't got much company when the men in this picture of Obama's top officials are gone:

And Merkel looks lonely once more when the treatment is applied to a group of leaders posing in Buckingham Palace. Only Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the president of Argentina, and The Queen remain with her.

This panel for the BBC's Question Time programme would be a lot smaller without the men:

While University Challenge would lose practically all of its contestants:

Elle magazine's #MoreWomen campaign, which aims calls for more women to be in visible, powerful positions and celebrates groups of women who support each other.

Elle's cultural director Lena de Casparis wrote: "There are too many instances where women are represented by a single female. In business, music, art and media, women rarely outnumber men."

"There is room for more of us at the top. One woman's success makes every woman stronger."

In January this year, Angela Merkel and other female leaders were photoshopped from the front page of an Orthodox Jewish newspaper in a picture of a solidarity march in Paris for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

HaMevaser, an Israeli ultra-Orthodox paper, doesn't ever show pictures of women and sometimes doesn't even print their names.

The cover as it appeared

The orignal photo

At the end of 2014, the No More Page 3 campaign cut out pictures of every man and every woman in The Sun over six months to protest against the representation of women in newspaper.

The video claimed: "The men are nearly all active, doing things. Not posed. The women are passive. It's all about how they look. When I look at the men's side, I see real life. But when I look at the women's side it doesn't seem real. It's all manufactured.

"This is a newspaper renowned for sport. And there's not a single picture of a woman doing sport... not one. The only older women on there are a woman on a mobility scooter, The Queen and Mrs Brown. There's a range of emotions on the men's side. The women are mainly smiling or pouting."

"What messages do these images send? Every day."

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