Changing the Culture that Creates…. Us

posted by Women's Media Nation
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:28am CST

(Ed. Note: Author Crystal Allene Cook is the former executive director of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.)

Whispering Wall

At the beginning, none of us probably really understood what was needed to do the job. Granted, I’d been involved in non-profit start-ups. But this one was different.

Initially the project started as a research study to investigate the disparity in the numbers of female characters versus male characters in entertainment media aimed at children (found by the researcher Dr. Stacy Smith to be a ratio of 1 to 4, that is 3 males for every one female seen–this hold true through most film in all rating categories; the stat is 2 – 3 males or so for every one female seen on TV in most TV ratings categories). I was hired to figure out how to translate this research into social change. As time went on, I understood that much more than research and a few events in Los Angeles would be needed to get more females included in front of and behind the cameras in the entertainment industry.

As word got out that there was someone in Hollywood hired to understand and do something about what happens there especially with respect to females, I soon became what I call “a whispering wall.” Many people, not all of them women, spoke to me privately about the discrimination they’d faced when trying to get a script placed with female or other minority leads or principals. Women spoke to me about their struggle in an industry in which, according to research by Dr. Martha Lauzen, still only 6% of most feature films are directed by women. Lauzen also has pointed out that the lack of females on screen has a correlation to the lack of females behind the scenes. Over and again, writers, directors, and producers told me about their bosses pushing upon them the need to add more male characters to any story focused primarily or even partially on a female.

I was told of the absolute futility of governmental influence or regulation and the virtual universal contempt by industry professionals for FCC regulations or governmental mandates. No one who does regulatory work, I was told, is respected by the entertainment industry.

I head tales of female directors turned away from shows simply for being female. They were told the crew wouldn’t listen to a woman or that women were “bitches” if directing.

I heard stories recounted of producers and networks that refused to feature TV shows with a black female lead, because they won’t be able to sell the show overseas, particularly to Europe. At the same time, I heard European media researchers complain of the trite entertainment diet forced upon them by American content producers.

One successful producer of a children’s comedy explained to me his casting tactic, of not pitching the choice he really wanted first…that often execs would then feel they were fighting for the obviously more talented, but maybe less than “visually” perfect underdog. More than a few male writers and producers revealed to me that it wasn’t until they became fathers of daughters that they began to explore more creative ways of portraying females…

I learned how the sexual harassment policy of one guild ran as such: anyone experiencing discrimination could report it to the guild, which would then report it to the producer, who then was charged with going around and asking everyone involved in a production if he/she saw any discrimination against person X. The officer of said guild lamented that when his constituents came to him (almost daily) with sexual harassment complaints, they quickly realized the protocol in place to protect them would likely ruin their careers.

I heard from female graduate students paying money at top universities in Los Angeles, who complained of preference from male film professors for male student directors and male student writers. As a result, female film and screenwriting students end up with less portfolio material under their belts or on their reels out of the gate from graduate school (mind you, where sex discrimination is highly illegal, and whose parents often are paying, and paying through the nose, for getting their daughters as much of a chance as their sons).

One phone call with a studio exec sticks in my mind. I was calling her to invite her to an event we were having. “Oh, I’ve known about this problem for twenty years,” she lamented. “There isn’t any point,” she continued. “No one listens.” I stayed on the line, giving those verbal cues one learns to show one is paying attention. “But, maybe I’ll go to this. Let me talk to people in my department. I worry about this with my own kids, though. I worry about what they watch.” She went back and forth a few more times about her concerns, what a problem gender disparity is, how she doesn’t agree with a lot of programming, but how futile change seems. Again, I “umm-hmmed.” Suddenly she shot to me in a harsh voice, “You know, I don’t want to argue about this with you.” I turned the conversation to, “It’s not your job to have to do this alone. That’s why we’re here.” She was arguing, not with me, nor with the facts of gender disparity, but instead with herself…

A few months into this job, I was a guest for a guild-related Diversity Day. Coming from the nonprofit and social sector world, I envisioned a celebration and much patting-on-the-back on jobs well done. An awards ceremony or at least a little Si, se puede!

Instead, the day largely comprised of women and people of color who had “made it” and had jobs in TV or film, and their repeated advice to newcomers to, when faced with harassment, discrimination, or wildly inappropriate commentary, to “suck it up” and “roll with it,” that is, not to let the mostly male, mostly white, folks in charge see you sweat or see you get offended by the “necessary” machinations of sexist, racist, or other demeaning “creative” or “shop” talk.

From folks at large studios, I heard comments such as: “The agents didn’t have any female comedy writers to send to us,” “We never realized there were fewer females,” “It’s so hard to get any content made with a female lead, please don’t knock us for her depiction if we do,” “But (fill-in-the-blank) was successful (pointing out a film that was an exception),” “Till now I’d never thought about the need to give the female a goal beyond romance,”; though, to be fair, my favorite comment was from a TV executive overseeing children’s content who proposed, “Although we don’t know exactly how our company did (on the male to female ratio in TV aimed at children), we should just assume the worst and act accordingly.”

Privy to some of the top studios in the industry and their story-generating processes, I was amazed to find out, given the unbelievable amounts of money at their disposal, that movie-making is not a thoroughly-market researched endeavor. That is, it is not run the way India produces more Miss Universes and Miss Worlds… with private donors paying to have a potential candidate’s gum line lengthened or shortened in order to get the statistically “perfect” smile. There often are no very specific instructions given animators and writers on how to produce a “marketable” character, one that would sell millions of movie tickets and millions of toys.

Despite the tremendous pressure to make money, and airplane hangars of it, often whether a lead or side character is male or female, wasp-waisted or “normal,” white or black or Asian or Latino, old or young, gorgeous or “normal,” clothed or scantily-clad, focused on career, adventure, or marriage, is largely up to the whims, decisions, preferences, prejudices, or convictions of the principal content-creators: the heads of creative, the directors, the writers, the animators, the producers, and the studio heads. Thus, a lot of what comes to the silver screen or TV screen is based on guesswork, where studio execs Creating for ChangeOf course, opponents to suggesting change offered me that no one has to be in the entertainment industry. That is, I countered, unless you just so happen to want to participate in the most culturally influential industry the world has ever known. But of course it’s not only about who is behind the camera, it’s about who’s in front of it. In working on gender issues in the entertainment industry over two and a half years, not one female (young girl or woman) I encountered, whether in the entertainment industry or not, doubted that how females are portrayed has a direct effect on her life personally.

Virtually every female I spoke with could relate the joy of, or the despair at, not seeing herself represented in the popular culture, or having herself misrepresented… or presented in such way it was obvious the film’s or show’s “creators” were not that creative, resorting instead to cliché, type, stereotype, or even worse, only flash and glamour, and no fiction.

At the encouragement of executives at the Tides Foundation, I reflected on what I’d learned and thought I had learned about the entertainment industry as a system. From this, I developed a “Wheel of Change on Gender in the Entertainment Industry,” in short, a blueprint to bring together the main organizations, people, and groups that could “turn the wheel” and create a leap with respect to gender in the industry. The blueprint maps the players and processes for a potential massive national and international collaboration, which, could, indeed, over a period of ten to twenty years, constitute a major leap forward for females in a world where increasingly, entertainment media, media, the internet, and technological savvy not only heavily influence social behavior, but also politics, policy, business practices, and, like it or not, elections…

With respect to gender portrayal and disparity in entertainment media, I have come to think of this process as a snake eating its tail kind of enterprise, where each group, when asked why such large disparity in depiction exists (and it was asked), points its collective fingers at another group that is “really” the culprit.
Let me state this very plainly: a severe skew in entertainment media (the stories our society renders large to tell itself) directly correlates to severe skews in the major spheres of power, money, and influence in our society: finance, industry/corporations, media (both entertainment and its increasingly close, buddy journalism), politics/government, the military, academia, and to some lesser degree, publishing. Like no other time in human history, the stories created by only a handful of people mostly located in a few cities in a couple of countries greatly influence not only our personal measures of physical attractiveness (that has been the case for almost a hundred years in terms of the silver screen), but more so than ever, also what we deem acceptable in terms of our personalities, that is, our manners and mannerisms, our sense of propriety, our sense of decency and indecency, our sense of achievement or failure, what goals we set for ourselves, how we regard the future, present, or past, our relationships to our government, our communities, our schools, our families, our children, our peers…ourselves. It is imperative that females be just as involved and just as valued as males in this vast stream of culture creation. The very many needs of our own society and those billions (yes, billions) of people around the world influenced by the entertainment media our society creates demand more inclusiveness, more variation, more complexity, more intelligence, and certainly, more creativity than ever before. All right, all right, you say. Your point is that if we all worked together and had a place at the table, we’d have a world of eternal happiness and sunshine. Great. Have a fun time making your way to Planet Utopia.

The entertainment industry is huge. But, really, truly, it ain’t army or military industrial complex or national security or UN or peace accords or nuclear bombs kind of huge. Unlike “world peace,” you don’t have to get all that many people on board for real change to happen…

Really, it looks something more like this. This is who’d you have to reach in order to effect changes in most American-owned/made media products for film, TV, the net, and video games:

At the writing of this, roughly, they are the mega companies of:

The Walt Disney Company: Disney/Pixar/ABC/ESPN/Touchstone/Miramax/etc., etc., etc.

Dreamworks/etc., etc., etc.
Sony: Sony/MGM/Columbia Pictures/etc., etc., etc.
National Amusements: Viacom/MTV/Nickelodeon/BET/Paramount Pictures/Comedy Central/CBS/etc., etc., etc.
Time Warner: Cartoon Network/HBO/Warner Brothers Pictures/AOL/Turner Broadcasting System/CNN/etc., etc., etc.
General Electric/Vivendi SA: NBC Universal
Electronic Arts: the world’s largest independent video game producer

In a little under a year and a half, working by myself and with others, I was able to identify the specific types of jobs with the most decision making power over the portrayal of gender in US-created content:

conglomerate heads
studio heads
heads of creative
producers
executives
directors
writers
show runners
casting directors
agents

And, using our telephones and an IMDBpro account, we figured out who held these jobs in those companies listed above.

What I am saying is, unlike “world peace,” most people with the decision-making power to create change in entertainment content are reachable. With the right combinations of flash, glamor, access, invitation, confirmed attendees, show, and armed with an IMDBpro account, you can find the folks that could, from one TV season to the next, from one Oscar season to the next, cause a tremendous shift in culture with foreseeable implications and reverberations nationally and worldwide. I mean it. No joke.

The steps for changing the stories that create us are there.

Here are some concrete steps to create this change:

Be more creative, inclusive, diverse in hiring behind the scenes, and reach at least twenty percent in hiring of females and folks of color in each of the positions of power in the entertainment industry in the positions on the above list
Be conscious of the content you create being an arbiter of gender equity, not only in the US, but also around the world. No, it ISN’T just a TV show or a film. Numerous studies prove entertainment media, along with our families and friends, creates how we behave.
Make entertainment content that is more creative, inclusive, diverse, and complex in its portrayal of females. Get them on screen as much as males are, and when you do, make them something more than adornments. Give them goals beyond romance. Show females as capable of making complex decisions
Realize there is not a personal code of ethics and then a separate code of ethics for your work; there is only ethics
Wake up and start at home, in your own field. It absolutely right to create amazing content about gender disparity or other tragedies in the rest of the world, but neither there, nor at home, turn a blind eye to gender disparity
Spread the word…. use your power of creativity and the tremendous power you have over culture to develop interesting and amazing solutions to gender disparity in your industry

To those holding the reins of entertainment content, let me say again, the power that entertainment media creators have is broad and vast in terms of its social effects. Go to work every day with that in mind. Bring that to the fore of your work….

Bring to the front of your mind the story that got you interested in show business in the first place.

Be true to the integrity that story had…. and make sure you can bring that kind of integrity to the widest group of people in your work.

So much, really, is counting on it…and, so much more than you maybe realized, or dreamed of, is possible.

~Crystal Allene Cook