Creative COW: Those eyerolls came in dozens of comments on the article – most from men – many of which sought to tell me I had it wrong or I was being dramatic. (This led me to turning off commenting on all my posts. Not because they bothered me, but because I felt they didn’t deserve to have their nonsensical words immortalized next to thoughtful analysis for young women to see and internalize.)
2 comments:
Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge the author’s disclaimer that she’s using the word “women” as an all-encompassing term, to include anyone who identifies as a woman and/or nonbinary. She also clarifies that most of the data discussed is about cisgender women. I think this was really thoughtful, and I’m really impressed. To see that in 2019, women only made up 5% of sound designers, 10% of sound editors, and 7% of composers was really disheartening. This didn’t even make a distinction between white women and women of color. It’s hard to be hopeful when you see that the trend of women in major media has stayed the same for over 20 years. And, the wage gap based on race is absolutely astounding. There is so much work to be done. 140,000 women lost their jobs in December 2020, and almost all of them were black. Overall, 4 out of 5 people who left the workforce in 2020 were women. Again, we have so much work to do.
The progress that the author pointed out in this article is a good progression from where we started. However, as she also oh so accurately points out, there is so much further to go. In my opinion any steps forward are good steps, but that does not at all negate the fact that we have only made it a few metaphorical feet in this journey of a thousand metaphorical miles. As a woman who is thinking about going into a very similar industry it truly a concerns of mine whether or not I will be able to be taken seriously in the future career I am choosing for myself. But, I only have to think about this from the perspective of a cis gender white woman. As the author illustrates in her exceptional use of statistics, the struggle for non cis gender women or women of color is at least double, if not triple, that of people like myself. That is the reason that a fight like this is so important. Not just to make it easier for me, but to hopefully make it equitable for the people that the industries and systems take advantage of and criticize the most.
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