The campaigning charity is helping to expose how the UK pension system undervalues mothers who take time off work.
The neon starburst is one of the most familiar graphic devices in retail. Loud, tacky-looking and impossible to miss, it highlights that something is a bargain. And if we’re honest, we’ve all ended up buying things we weren’t looking for – perhaps didn’t even want — due to the mesmerising power of its allure.
Now the national charity and campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, which fights discrimination against mothers, has launched a campaign called “Thanks for your service*” that harnesses the power of the starburst for a very different reason.
The campaign involves sticking giant “33% off” starbursts over women’s faces. It’s not subtle in the slightest. But it’s also an effective way to draw attention to an uncomfortable fact: that the average woman in the UK retires with a pension pot a third smaller than men’s.
The reasons for this run deep. Historically, the pension system has been built around the idea of continuous, full-time employment. Yet across their lifetime, women are far more likely to go part-time, take a career break, step back to care for children or relatives, or a combination of these. For most people, it’s only decades later that the consequences of all this for their pension truly hit home. Pregnant Then Screwed’s campaign is designed to make us all think about it right now.
Central design device
Like many of the best design ideas, the brilliance of this campaign lies in its simplicity. Think about just how impactful, in comparison, a graph or pie chart with some explainer copy would have been. Not much at all, right?
In contrast, creative director Gemma Phillips and LA-based designer Rachel Many just took a visual language we all instinctively understand and turned it on its head. The message is stark: women have been marked down by society, just as a supermarket marks down old or unpopular items.
As Gemma puts it: “Women are being devalued by the pension system every day; we just don’t see it happening. The aim of this campaign is to make this devaluation visible as boldly as possible so that action can be taken sooner rather than later.”
Photography
The portraits are shot in stark black and white, and the starbursts come in acid green, lime, mustard and magenta: exactly the kind of colours retailers use to attract attention in a crowded shopping aisle. Similarly here, these neon shades shout out from billboards, while the use of monochrome keeps the focus on the women underneath the stickers.
The studio portraits were shot by Sane Seven, an international photographer whose work has appeared in The Sunday Times, TIME and Forbes. She explains the unique challenge this presented.
“Portraiture usually asks us to see the individual behind a statistic,” she points out. “This campaign invited me to reverse that thinking, using portrait photography to present women deliberately as a statistic in a way that feels both meaningful and powerful.” The effect is unsettling, to say the least. You can see the women’s jewellery, clothes and smiles, but not their eyes.
A second set of images takes the campaign out onto the streets of London. Women hold up oversized cardboard starbursts as they go about their day: one with a coffee cup, another next to a toddler in a buggy.
A final set of campaign images appears in the form of crumpled thermal till receipts, itemising women’s working lives in the language of a weekly shop. “1x Pregnancy”, “1x Return to work @6 weeks”, “5x Days a week nursery fees”, “0x Family support”, “1x Redundancy” and, in between, “Blood / Sweat / Tears”.
At the bottom, the subtotal reads “-Motherhood Tax” and the pension total “-33%”. Then comes the payoff: “THANKS FOR YOUR SERVICE*”. As the campaign puts it: “This isn’t a thank you. It’s a massive devaluation.”
Campaign rollout
The campaign is running on billboards and digital screens in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Manchester, Birmingham and Southampton, as well as in print, on social media and on the street. A number of celebrated mums are backing the campaign, including content creator Cat Simms, TV presenter Ashley Louise James, journalist Anna Whitehouse, comedian Victoria Emes, campaigner Agnes Agyepong and skincare expert Caroline Hirons.
“This campaign shines a light on how the motherhood penalty plays out across a woman’s lifetime, resulting in pension pots too small to live on, hardship later in life, and being financially reliant on others,” says Pregnant Then Screwed’s Rachel Grocott. “We love the punch and creativity of this campaign, and know that it will kick-start a much-needed conversation on how and why we devalue women in this way.”
