The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[xoxoxoBruce]

The internet wasn't needed for news to travel, there were ships and people traveling back and forth all the time. Guys like Franklin practically commuted, as well as corresponding with smart guys all over Europe. News of longer, lower, wider, ways to improve productivity traveled fast. We'd had water powered mills here for 150 years or more by 1800, and before 1776 a lot of mills here were owned by foreigners. Even if a couple of those foreigners had round blades who's to say a woman didn't think of it. But nobody patented it, so Tabitha wins because she was obviously a witch, being Samantha's kid.

[DanaC]

I love this advert. I love (almost) everything about this advert. I like the ordinary dudeness of the player. Very nicely done. I like that they decided it was a good idea to also show a female player.

It's really not so long ago that this would have been pretty much unthinkable in this genre for anything but an indie game (femShep notwithstanding)

[DanaC]

Fascinating. This caught my attention:

From 2007 through 2014, according to Smith’s research, women made up only 30.2 percent of speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films.

Another study I read about, though can't recall the details, showed a similar imbalance in the gender of characters in children's tv.

Facepalm moment:

When I phoned another powerful Hollywood player to ask about the issue, he said dismissively, ‘‘Call some chicks.’’

[DanaC]

There's a lot in that piece that is heartening. But then there's things like this that make me want to do violence:

From Nora Ephron to Dee Rees, women who write their own material may have a better chance to direct it. But even in the writing phase, women must contend with Hollywood conventions that women on-screen must be likable or cleave to Madonna-whore-catfight stereotypes. ‘‘I’ve had male executives say that my lead character was unlikable because she slept with a lot of guys,’’ says the director Julie Taymor. Liz Meriwether, the 34-year-old creator of Fox’s ‘‘New Girl,’’ says that before this show, she received notes from executives saying, ‘‘I don’t understand how this character can be smart and sexy.’’

and this:

But if only 1.9 percent of the top 100 films are helmed by women, there is virtually no trickle-down effect. ‘‘What struck me the most was how blatant and out in the open some of the discrimination was,’’ says Ariela Migdal, who initially helped oversee the A.C.L.U. gender-discrimination case. ‘‘Agents openly say, ‘I’m not putting you up for that because this guy won’t hire a woman director.’ The list for directing big films is five plausible dudes and Kathryn Bigelow. And Bigelow is not going to direct ‘Jurassic World.’ You can’t have a list with no women.’’ Executives have been known to say, ‘‘Oh, we hired a woman once, but it didn’t really work out that well.’’

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by DanaC

But then there's things like this that make me want to do violence:

That's not the answer.

[Lamplighter]

Originally Posted by DanaC

There's a lot in that piece that is heartening. But then there's things like this that make me want to do violence
...

I think the next thought was: "Can you insert a rape scene here "

[DanaC]

As a spin-off from women in film more generally, here's an interesting piece about female super heroes. It's a really positive article, about the changing scene. But it also frames the problems well. What stifles development of female characters is often the way in which they have previously been depicted. Films with leading female characters have been made and bombed, and the lesson executives and male film makers have taken from that is not that they were bad films with badly drawn and shallow characters, but that people don't want to see female leads - yet plenty of male-led films bomb and nobody suggests that making a film with a male lead is a risk. Male-led films are judged, and succeed or fail, as films. Female-led films are judged, and succeed or fail as ambassadors for the concept of female-led films. And, as the article Lamp posted points out, films that succeed with a female lead, instead of acting as a proof of that concept are set aside as flukes and forgotten, whilst the next flop gets included in the proof that female-led films are a risk, and remembered as such for decades.

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-ra...male-superhero

Currently, men outnumber women five to one production roles; in 2014 women made up just 13% of directors and writers. But the problem isn’t just men writing fewer female superheroes, Rosenberg says, it’s that they write them badly. “A white man is never defined by his whiteness and maleness,” continues Rosenberg, “whereas being female is treated as a defining facet.” Writers and producers treating women like “The Other”, she says, results in the same stereotypes again and again: femme fatales, coy virgins, stern battleaxes.

That right there is pretty much 100% my problem with the way female super heroes have generally been depicted.

In fact, a dictionary-worth of terms exists to describe how unfairly women are treated in the superhero genre. There’s Women in Refrigerators Syndrome, where female characters are killed off in a gruesome way – say, stuffed in a fridge – as a plot device to motivate male characters. There’s the Smurfette Principle: that there will always be only one woman on a team of men. And there’s the wonderfully named Sexy Lamp Test. Coined by comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, it states that “If you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft.”

Nicely put ;p

With the varied, more dimensional women that we’re starting to see, though, it finally feels as if the genre is recognising and reacting to these disparities. In 20 years, when we’re watching the 11th Avengers sequel, will we look back and laugh at how we once wrote films where cape-wearing journalists spun the world backwards to reverse time, but we couldn’t write a female character who wasn’t someone’s wife or mother?

[sexobon]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Fame is fleeting.

[Happy Monkey]

It's a major award!

[Undertoad]

It works the other way as well.

In "A Christmas Story", dad delightedly gets a leggy woman by delivery, and displays her in the front window, to the embarrassment of his wife.

The film is improved

In "Aladdin", Young poor Aladdin can't vie for the love of princess Jasmine. So he steals a woman from the Cave of Wonders, which is considered a legendary task. But that's still not good enough, so he rubs the woman a special way, at which point he gets the wishes he needs to transform himself until he can marry Jasmine.

The film is vastly improved

[xoxoxoBruce]

13 women who transformed the world of economics, at the World Economics Forum.

Economist Justin Wolfers recently wrote about how female economists are airbrushed out of academic discussion when they have a male coauthor.
We decided to bring together some of the women who’ve had the biggest impact on the subject and the practice of economic policy, whether in academia, business, politics, or education.
These women are not just modern academic economists. Several are historical figures who made major contributions to the discipline at a time when female participation was incredibly difficult.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I noticed in this 1925 picture of 6 high school girls, at least 3 of the hairstyles probably wouldn't draw a second look in any decade.

[Lamplighter]

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very, very good,
But when she was bad, she was horrid.

[Aliantha]

That girl on the right in the front row looks like the kind of woman you might not want to piss off, especially when she's holding a gun. haha

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yes, be careful whom you spurn.