Women and Hollywood: In a recent episode of the television series Mad Men, two advertising agencies merge. Each agency has a single woman on their creative team and one woman is told she's 'toast' because the combined agency already 'has one'. As in one woman. In the scenes that follow, the extra woman is 'disappeared' with no mention of her again.
That scene takes place in 1968, but could be mid 2013 where women fill only about a fifth of the jobs in the film industry across all film positions. How can we change that? And why should we?
3 comments:
Gender equality is very important and this article does a good job of showing that. Men and women, in general, have different skill sets. Just as how some people are just naturally better at math or history, women tend to be better at things, such as communication or pressure, than men and vice versa. That is not to say that all men or all women fit into this box. Diversity on any level is useful. Every person has a different background, a different story and a different set of skills that they can bring to the team. In a field such as film or theatre, diversity is even more useful because they rely heavily on collaboration. Having a little diversity of any type is going to benefit the company by bring more ideas to the table. That said, I would agree with the author, employees should first look for the most qualified candidates and use gender, race, et cetera as a tie-breaker. Seeking diversity for the sake of diversity can be as detrimental if not more than a lack of it.
This article succeeds and fails at the same time in conveying what I think is a very important message. When first reading the article, I was very impressed that they weren't - as many articles sadly do - just saying men are stupid and bad and women should do everything. Many feminist articles and even people who just think they're helping are really just being broad and not helpful. This article began to stress the importance of gender diversity and that not everything should be run solely by women, but it should be a combination so that as many demographics as possible are represented in leadership among companies, teams and other male-dominated places in our lives. Sadly once they started listing ways to improve the workplace and our lives, they slipped away from what should have been their main point.
No one is perfect and no demographic is perfect. If we can increase diversity as much as possible and get new ideas and new ways of working/thinking being moved around, life could be much more productive and efficient. I believe that the 26% increase in performance stated in the article can be increased even more once not only gender but age, race and other demographic categories are added to create the most diverse and qualified group of people possible heading up corporations and projects in the entertainment business.
The author makes a good point in saying that “gender diversity contributes to success”, and it is interesting to see this when so many articles and interviews make a point to choose one gender over the other. It is important to recognize the differences between men and women, but professionally what each offers. Each of the ten points highlights something that men and women can work forward to together in order to create an equal ground.
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