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Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Women on TV scarcer this year than last year, SDSU study finds
www.usatoday.com: More bad news on the Hollywood gender diversity front: The latest study from San Diego State University found that women are scarcer on and in television this year than in previous years – meaning fewer women to celebrate at the Emmy Awards next week.
I normally gravitate to articles that have to do with women in the workplace due to the recent issues that have been occuring concerning this subject. Everytime I read one of these articles, I always get more and more discouraged. While reading this article, I learned that “69 percent of programs employed five or fewer women behind the cameras, while only 13 percent of programs employed five or fewer men”. As someone interested in working behind the scenes, and being female, this information truly scared me. It’s shocking to hear that the women in the workplace are scarce year by year, especially being a freshman in college. Although these statistics sound scary something that is reassuring is that there are about 3 men in my class, and all the rest are women. It’s nice to see that although there are problems with women behind the scenes, the interest is still high. Another part to this article is how there will be an extremely finite amount of women being celebrated at the Emmy Awards this year for their hard work. Executive director, Martha Lauzen, said, “"It's a vicious cycle of underemployment which results in less recognition which, in turn, reinforces skewed gender ratios behind the scenes”.
Is it acceptable to just comment: “and in other news, water is wet, the sky is blue, and are we really shocked by this?” and let the unspoken frustration and anger fill the rest of the word requirements? Probably not. This is aggravating and unacceptable, especially when you start getting into how little representation women of color have on screen. Forget LGBT women, fat women, or disabled women, or any other subset of women that are probably not represented. And when we do get representation its crap shows like Insatiable which has the lovely lesson of “lose weight fast, wire your jaw shut, don’t eat for 3 months, not only will you lose weight but you’ll become a super model and then you can become the biggest bully in the world! Eating disorders are funny!” And while I hate to wonder if the #MeToo movement has contributed to the decline, I can’t say I wouldn’t be shocked if it did. In places where women are in charge, of course women are getting hired, but in places where women aren’t in charge, we are already aware that there are some men who would rather not hire us in case “Those pesky women decide to say we did something bad.” Here’s a thought: don’t be a jerk, and maybe people won’t call you out on creating a hostile work environment. On the other hand, I’m not going to lie and say I haven’t passed on applying for certain places because I know it’s a hostile environment. It’s a bad cyclical environment we’ve got going on right now, and we need something to change.
It's consistently a part of our consumerism culture that once something stops being a huge part of the conversation, media and other companies will stop caring to make an effort. Like many other things, if it doesn't make them extra money, it does not matter. When everyone was talking about the lack of women in television, it suddenly became worthwhile to produce more things with women, because they knew that people would watch it. The conversation was considered over after that by many mainstream media. Now if anyone accused them of not being diverse enough, they could point to that one show they produced in 2016 that had a female POC lead. They simply could not be discriminatory, because they have one show with a gay character. It's an insurance policy for them. The reason women are once again declining, is because now people have shifted their focus to championing the good shows out there that are diverse. While this is good, we have stopped pointing out the fact that that great, diverse show is the only one that network has. It would honestly behoove all of these networks to produce more diverse shows, as channels like Freeform can attest to, since most of their shows are female led and diverse, and it's one of the most popular networks in the under 30 demographic. I hate it, but the only way we can change these networks minds is if we show them the numbers and prove that these shows will work, and we don't want anymore generic white male led shows.
3 comments:
I normally gravitate to articles that have to do with women in the workplace due to the recent issues that have been occuring concerning this subject. Everytime I read one of these articles, I always get more and more discouraged. While reading this article, I learned that “69 percent of programs employed five or fewer women behind the cameras, while only 13 percent of programs employed five or fewer men”. As someone interested in working behind the scenes, and being female, this information truly scared me. It’s shocking to hear that the women in the workplace are scarce year by year, especially being a freshman in college. Although these statistics sound scary something that is reassuring is that there are about 3 men in my class, and all the rest are women. It’s nice to see that although there are problems with women behind the scenes, the interest is still high. Another part to this article is how there will be an extremely finite amount of women being celebrated at the Emmy Awards this year for their hard work. Executive director, Martha Lauzen, said, “"It's a vicious cycle of underemployment which results in less recognition which, in turn, reinforces skewed gender ratios behind the scenes”.
Is it acceptable to just comment: “and in other news, water is wet, the sky is blue, and are we really shocked by this?” and let the unspoken frustration and anger fill the rest of the word requirements? Probably not. This is aggravating and unacceptable, especially when you start getting into how little representation women of color have on screen. Forget LGBT women, fat women, or disabled women, or any other subset of women that are probably not represented. And when we do get representation its crap shows like Insatiable which has the lovely lesson of “lose weight fast, wire your jaw shut, don’t eat for 3 months, not only will you lose weight but you’ll become a super model and then you can become the biggest bully in the world! Eating disorders are funny!” And while I hate to wonder if the #MeToo movement has contributed to the decline, I can’t say I wouldn’t be shocked if it did. In places where women are in charge, of course women are getting hired, but in places where women aren’t in charge, we are already aware that there are some men who would rather not hire us in case “Those pesky women decide to say we did something bad.” Here’s a thought: don’t be a jerk, and maybe people won’t call you out on creating a hostile work environment. On the other hand, I’m not going to lie and say I haven’t passed on applying for certain places because I know it’s a hostile environment. It’s a bad cyclical environment we’ve got going on right now, and we need something to change.
It's consistently a part of our consumerism culture that once something stops being a huge part of the conversation, media and other companies will stop caring to make an effort. Like many other things, if it doesn't make them extra money, it does not matter. When everyone was talking about the lack of women in television, it suddenly became worthwhile to produce more things with women, because they knew that people would watch it. The conversation was considered over after that by many mainstream media. Now if anyone accused them of not being diverse enough, they could point to that one show they produced in 2016 that had a female POC lead. They simply could not be discriminatory, because they have one show with a gay character. It's an insurance policy for them. The reason women are once again declining, is because now people have shifted their focus to championing the good shows out there that are diverse. While this is good, we have stopped pointing out the fact that that great, diverse show is the only one that network has. It would honestly behoove all of these networks to produce more diverse shows, as channels like Freeform can attest to, since most of their shows are female led and diverse, and it's one of the most popular networks in the under 30 demographic. I hate it, but the only way we can change these networks minds is if we show them the numbers and prove that these shows will work, and we don't want anymore generic white male led shows.
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