State of the Nation 2016
Women for Change
Dear Readers: For many people, 2016 will be defined and remembered as the year completely fixated on a nasty United States presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The year was full of propaganda and media coverage beyond anything seen in recent elections. But another topic worth dwelling on is the year’s hardships and triumphs for women’s rights. The most obvious hardship for women’s right in 2016 is the United States’ inability to elect our first female president. Many people were excited to have the first female on the presidential ballot in our country’s history. After the candidate’s loss, the question of when the glass ceiling will be broken is on the minds of many. While we were unable to break that ceiling, other women in the spotlight are taking a stand. Actress Mila Kunis refused to pose semi-nude for the promotion of a movie. The directors told her she would never work in Hollywood again, but she did. Woman are beginning to realize that oppression is no longer necessary, that woman in the public spotlight can sway opinions without denying their femininity. Megyn Kelly has gone against every “rule” for a female news anchor and the world hasn’t come crashing down on her. In some cases, she is getting praised for standing up for her rights to express herself through her work with no regards to what is proper because she is a woman. Though the presidential glass ceiling will remain a huge part of the legacy of 2016, other women have taken steps towards equality. With powerful figures like Mila Kunis and Megyn Kelly paving the way, it seems possible to create change in our society. It is the job of everyone, man or woman, to continue this positive movement towards gender equality in the year of 2017 and beyond. Sincerely,
Glass Ceiling
The Holds by Gail Collins | November 11, 2016 It took Hillary Clinton a while to talk about the first-woman-president idea. She didn’t stress it early in her 2008 campaign. But people kept coming up to her with pictures of their grandmothers who got to vote for the first time in 1920. Others begged her to get the job done so they could see a woman in the White House before they died. The dream sank in. “Now, I — I know — I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling,” Clinton told her grieving supporters. It was already late Wednesday morning by the time she gave her concession speech, winner of the popular vote but loser all the same. She told all
Broken Glass: WallpaperCave Clinton: http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/candidates/hillary-clinton
the little girls who were watching — and there probably still were little girls watching, since the excitement had been so grand — “never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.” And so it ended. But when we look back on the Clinton campaign as part of history, we’ll see something different from the abrupt, shocking defeat her backers experienced last week. It was a big step in a journey that’s been both inspiring and really, really long. When history teachers want to include women in the story of the American Revolution, they often have their students read the famous letter Abigail Adams wrote in 1776 to her husband, urging him to “remember the ladies” and write laws for the new country that would “put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty.” The kids are not generally encouraged to move on to John Adams’s reply: “As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh.”
It was, to say the least, going to take awhile — more than a century before much of the country would even begin talking seriously about whether women should be allowed to vote. Nobody at the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 seemed able to imagine a female president. When Rochester women organized a follow-up gathering, many of the Seneca leaders were taken aback that there was a female presiding officer. The suffrage movement, when it did get off the ground, was … effortful.
I believe that the rights of women and girls is the
unfinished business of the 21st century. -Hillary Clinton
I know...we have still not
“To get the word ‘male’ in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country 52 years of pauseless campaign,” said Carrie Chapman Catt, the movement leader, reeling off the kind of list that is made only by people who know their ultimate achievement may just be checking more things off the list. (“… 56 campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to urge legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters … 277 campaigns to persuade state party conventions to include woman suffrage planks…”) Hillary Clinton was the perfect heir to that tradition. “It’ll be a long slog,” she said a year ago, and wow, was she right. After her razor-thin defeat, some analysts wondered if the whole problem hadn’t been how boring her campaign had been. Younger people had seen Barack Obama leap onto the public stage and knock the socks off the country with his compelling oratory, his cool persona and his vision — sort of vague but wonderful — of a new American politics in which everybody would work together for the common good. And then suddenly, there was a black man in the White House. It was an achievement so unexpected that many Americans wept in joy and astonishment.
SHATTERED that highest and hardest glass ceiling.
-Hillary Clinton
Clinton didn’t leap — she trudged. The difference between her political career and Obama’s was, in a way, a perfect reflection of the difference between the civil rights movement and women’s fight for equal rights. Historically, black Americans had grown up as a separate group, victims of endless injustice and brutality. When they fought back, the white majority responded with rage and violence. Then, after years of sitins and protest marches and bloody freedom rides, the good guys won. Racial injustice, of course, continued. But we’ll never forget that epic drama. Women had precious few rights themselves, but they weren’t a separate, enslaved group. They were living in the bedrooms and parlors of the male authority figures who were their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. When they rebelled, they were laughed at. The women tried to win over men who were simultaneously their lovers and oppressors with an excruciatingly slow, patient drive to change their minds — remember all those petitions and referendums.
And then there was HILLARY CLINTON. She was, in many ways, INEVITABLE.
One 1915 referendum in New York State involved 10,300 meetings, 7.5 million leaflets and a parade of 20,000 people. The women lost anyway. The opposition was urged on by, among others, The New York Times. Two years later, when the pressure for national suffrage picked up, the paper argued that the country was at war and that in a time of national peril, “strong men must make the decisions that control policies.” When the big victory finally came in 1920, suffragists expected a national transformation. The women’s vote was going to mean cleaner government, better education, safer housing and any number of other improvements in the lives of American families. In a quick preview of what was supposed to come, Congress passed the SheppardTowner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act in 1921 — a modest program to educate poor women about child care and establish clinics in impoverished rural areas. In 1929, Congress repealed it. Women, it turned out, were voting much like their husbands — on the basis of their ethnicity, economic class and geographic location. It wasn’t until the 1980s that pollsters began to notice a gap — that women voters
were more interested in domestic programs like education and the social safety net. They leaned Democratic, but they didn’t play gender favorites. This year, with the first female nominee pitted against a man who was practically defined by a tape recording about his girlgrabbing exploits, many people expected that the long-awaited “women’s vote” tidal wave would finally arrive. Still didn’t really happen. The women’s movement, meanwhile, had transformed the country. Abigail Adams’s letter finally got the proper response — a flood of legislation guaranteed legal equality in everything from jobs to college sports. It was a whole new world, but with men at the top. In 1964, when Margaret Chase Smith ran for the Republican presidential nomination, much of the country found the idea bizarre. One Los Angeles Times columnist argued that presidential candidates should be 45 to 55 (Smith was 66) and noted that, unfortunately, women that age were going through certain unmentionable changes that made them unreliable. Yet it made a difference. A young Hillary Rodham opened Life magazine and found Smith’s story. “I had no idea there was such a woman,” Clinton recalled. Shirley Chisholm, the congresswoman from New York, tried next. If people assumed that black presidents or women presidents would wait until
All we can know now is that when we talk about how she got there, we’ll be telling Hillary Clinton’s story.
956,733 miles
112 COUNTRIES IN 4 YEARS some vague point in the future, Chisholm decided “it was time in 1972 to make that someday come.” She was the first woman to run on the Democratic side, a fine symbol but not a serious contender. And then there was Hillary Clinton. She was, in many ways, inevitable. If the first women elected to Congress were frequently taking the seats of dead or retired husbands, there she was, a former first lady. If the road to political power for women involved a century of slogging, she was the epitome of the dedicated slogger. She was the secretary of state who logged 956,733 miles and visited 112 countries in four years on the job. And while there had certainly been critical missions, a whole lot of those miles were dedicated to encouraging low-profile strivers. See Clinton chatting about chickens with a Kenyan woman farmer, and you’ve got a historical echo of Eleanor Roosevelt helping West Virginia homesteaders shop for their first refrigerators. Millions of women who voted on Tuesday could remember a time when their credit cards had to come in their husbands’ or fathers’ names, when a female physician was so rare she would
inevitably be referred to as “the woman doctor,” and when the presumption that women needed to be home during the day taking care of the house was so pervasive that a few states still used all-male juries. Many felt that the final, righteous ending of the story would be a woman in the White House. Now some of them may be worried that they’ll die before a woman is ever elected president. Perhaps Hillary Clinton thinks that, too. But in this whole long, long amazing story, we celebrate the steps. Susan B. Anthony didn’t live to vote, but this year on Election Day, women stood in line to put flowers on her grave. Sometime soon, there’ll be another woman presidential nominee. Maybe she’ll be in the Clinton tradition, the grand and glorious American worker bees. Maybe she’ll just leap out, like Barack Obama did, a fresh face with a new message. All we can know now is that when we talk about how she got there, we’ll be telling Hillary Clinton’s story.
No One Tells
Megyn Kelly What to Wear by Vanessa Friedman | December 17, 2016
I felt very strongly, I was not going to be defined by what some else deemed appropriate. -Megyn Kelly
Megyn Kelly — breakout star of the 2016 presidential campaign, anchor of the “The Kelly File” on Fox News, current object of employment desire for multiple networks, best-selling author, mother, wife, daughter and friend (the last four being how she describes herself) — has something she wants everyone to know. Really. A lot. Listen up.
Not just that it is dangerous when Presidentelect Donald J. Trump calls out a single citizen on social media, seemingly giving permission to his followers to turn into rabid attack dogs, although she knows firsthand what that is like, having been the original target of his wrath for almost a year, starting in August 2015. Not just that hard work and an unsparing sense of your own strengths and weaknesses (and those of other people) can put you in a good place, though she writes about that a lot in her book, which is called, naturally, “Settle for More,” a catchphrase she also drops strategically into conversation. But also that she in no way apologizes for wearing that spaghetti-strap dress to the Republican National Convention in July. You know, the one that sent the internet into what she called a “meltdown” because it revealed a whole lot of … shoulder! And thus, was unlike any dress that had been seen on a serious anchor ever, except maybe at the White
House Correspondents Dinner. Definitely never behind a desk. “It was a lovely dress,” she said — this in a car during a brief respite back home in New York between book tour stops. “A convention is a kind of free-form extravaganza, and there are certain settings where you can take risks. So I just thought: ‘Yes, I can do this. I can be smart and challenging while I wear spaghetti straps, and everyone is just going to have to get their heads around that.’” Just to prove it, she has worn it again. Because, she said, “I felt very strongly, I was not going to be defined by what someone else deemed appropriate.” Indeed, for the past few years, ever since Ms. Kelly, 46, began making a name for herself as the person willing to call out power players on their own contradictions, contortions (verbal and policy-related) and cock-ups, she has become famous for refusing to be boxed in by anyone else’s “appropriate”: not her network’s, nor a political
party’s, nor the mythical dos and don’ts of career girl dress. She took on Newt Gingrich over his “anger issues” in October, sparred with the Republican Svengali Karl Rove over his electoral math in 2012 and challenged the conservative radio host Mike Gallagher over his dismissal of maternity leave. These moments have become widely known as “Megyn Moments,” so named by Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The New York Times, in a profile last year. But what has been less widely acknowledged is that they extend far beyond her reports and interviews at the anchor desk into a broader statement about how women should be able to frame their gender. Put simply, she doesn’t just say what she wants. She wears what she wants. “You cannot underestimate the effect of that,” said Tammy Haddad, chief executive of Haddad Media and a former MSNBC political director. “Her personal image and her business image are one and the same. The intensity she brings to her work, she brings to her look, and she doesn’t allow it to get in her way. That’s good for all women. And it is completely different from what came before.”
Put simply, she doesn’t just say what she wants. She wears what she wants. For years, industry wisdom suggested that a female anchor, like many female executives, should dress like her male colleagues: in a suit, with a dark jacket and blouse. In 1996, when MSNBC began, Katie Couric donned a beige jacket and black turtleneck for the debut broadcast; by 2006, when she became the first woman to solo anchor the “CBS Evening News,” she had loosened up enough to wear a white jacket and black T-shirt. This has, admittedly, changed, with the brightly colored and sometime patterned sleeveless sheath dress currently a favorite of newswomen such as Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe” and Gayle King, co-anchor of “CBS This Morning.” However, the fact that Ms. Kelly is on at 9 p.m. rather than during breakfast puts her choices in a different category, Ms. Haddad said: “She is talking to the primetime audience, the critical audience.” And what she is telling them, Ms. Kelly said, is “that, within reason, they can make their own choices about how they
look and how they act.” “I do think there is a new archetype for women emerging that rejects the bounds that have been placed on them,” she added. A 1992 profile of Diane Sawyer in Vanity Fair, for example, subtitled, “How she finally beat the glamour rap.” Ms. Kelly, who appeared on the magazine’s cover last February, only the second female newscaster to do so, has no problem with the glamour rap. In part because she doesn’t ignore it. Describing the haircut she got before the second Republican debate, for example, when she was deep in her Trump war and decided to lop her beach-babe waves into a slicked-back crop, Ms. Kelly quite cheerfully took a four-letter invitation and turned it into a taunt — thus owning the vulgarity and weaponizing what might otherwise have seemed a mere beauty decision. In her book she writes that when she went to meet Mr. Trump for the first time since their public tussle to discuss having him do an interview
with her, she wore her favorite black sheath Gucci dress. “I feel strong in it,” she said. By acknowledging the role clothes play in her own life and psyche, she is contravening one of the last taboos: If women want to be taken seriously, they are not supposed to take fashion seriously. A patently idiotic idea. In this she is part of a handful of women in the public eye who are breaking that rule, including Michelle “no sleeves” Obama and Sheryl “no hoodies” Sandberg. “We talk about it a lot: What is the world we are trying to create for our daughters — she has one, I have two — and how we can move things forward?” said Debra Netschert, a managing director of Jennison Associates, an asset management firm, who has been friends with Ms. Kelly for about four years. It is not a coincidence that in 2010, when Ms. Kelly moved from the morning show “America’s Newsroom” to become co-host of the afternoon show “America Live,” she hired her own stylist. Generally, the Fox anchors use the Fox stylist, just as they use the Fox hair and makeup people, which is why there is what is generally known as a “Fox Look”: for women, clingy
brightly colored poly-rayon dresses that “pop” on TV, tousled hair and a lot of eye makeup, lip gloss and base. But, she said, that means “we all sort of look the same.” When she started in TV after a nine-year career as a lawyer, she wore mostly navy, black and gray suits, and pinstripes but then Fox put her in its wardrobe, “which was weird, because I had never really worn color before,” she said. So when she got her own show, she said she decided “I wanted to define myself differently.” Which is to say, “as myself,” rather than as the network’s product. She enlisted the help of her neighbor, Dana Perriello, whom she knew first as a mom, but who had a sideline as a personal stylist. Because they were friends before they worked together, “She knew who I was,” Ms. Kelly said, and Ms. Perriello had an idea about how Ms. Kelly could express herself. They began to define a “Megyn look,” which had to do with clothes that were “strong, stylish, sleek, tailored, feminine, but not frilly,” Ms. Kelly said. “I don’t like frills.” “She wanted to be fashionable not just in the news world, but in any world,” said Ms. Perriello, who puts
outfits together for Ms. Kelly — dress, shoes, jewelry — and sends her look books of everything pre-assembled. Now Ms. Kelly wears mostly dresses by Victoria Beckham, Stella McCartney, Roland Mouret and Narciso Rodriguez, though Ms. Perriello is increasingly adding separates (and sleeves). The spaghettistrap dress was by Ralph Lauren. Her color palette is once again dominated by black and white, with the occasional red and blue thrown in. She likes a cutout and a high spiked heel. She also likes leather and, Ms. Perriello said, “hardware.” She has recently been wearing a lot of asymmetrical cuts, “which is not very common in news,” Ms. Perriello said. What she does not wear is florals or anything too lacy. Though earlier this year she said that she, along with many of her female colleagues, was sexually harassed by the former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, and though she writes about it in her book, all of that happened during her “frumpy law-firm suit period,” not during her later, more
fashion-forward period. A fact she pointed out to underscore that such harassment was really about power and not self-presentation. No woman is “asking for it” because of what she wears, and no woman should be judged for it, though judging — in a dismissive and derogatory way — is exactly what Ms. Kelly experienced earlier this year when Mr. Trump and assorted others resurfaced a 2010 GQ shoot of Ms. Kelly in a black slip and stilettos, draped over a chair. In January, @gene70 tweeted the photo with the
What is the world we are trying to create for our daughters— she has one, I have two — and how we can move things forward? -Debra Netschert
She has regularly refused to categorize herself as a feminist, because she thinks it is nichifying. Tawni Bannister for The New York Times
message, “And this is the bimbo that’s asking presidential questions?” Mr. Trump retweeted it. Ms. Kelly was having none of it. “They tried to slutshame me!” she said. “But I think I looked great. I had just turned 40, and I was pregnant. Some people at Fox still think it was a mistake, but I refuse to have to dismiss these options because of other people’s prejudices, and my willingness to engage just proves they are wrong.” In other words, it was appropriate because Megyn Kelly said it was appropriate. Rhetorically, this is not unlike the argument Gloria Steinem used when someone told her at her 40th
birthday that she didn’t look 40. Ms. Steinem responded: “This is what 40 looks like.” Ms. Kelly, however, may not like the comparison. She has regularly refused to categorize herself as a feminist, because she thinks it is nichifying. She also rejects descriptions such as “pioneer” and “trailblazer,” and says, “You don’t want to get drunk on your own wine,” and, “I’m just trying to be authentic.” The irony is, insisting on her femininity while also insisting on her due that she can have her career and her family, too, and in your face with a spaghetti strap if you don’t like that — may be the most authentically feminist act of all.
Women Job Statistics Women in Hollywood Top 100 Grossing Films
Top 500 Grossing Films
Directors 4%
Directors
11%
Writers 11%
Writers
14%
Executive Producers 13%
Executive Producers
19%
Producers
Producers
25%
Editors 14%
Editors
20%
Cinematographers 3%
Cinematographers
19%
7%
http://womenandhollywood.com/resources/statistics/2016-statistics/
Women in Politics Elected Office
Seats Held by Women
Available Seats
Percentage
U.S. Congress
104
535
19.4%
Senate
21
100
21%
House of Representatives
83
435
19.1%
Statewide Executive Offices
74
312
23.7%
http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/women-elective-office-2017
Only
136 More Years
By Lisa Ryan | September 22, 2016 Let’s grab celebratory drinks sometime in the year 2152, because that’s when the gender pay gap will finally close, according to a new report. That’s right, us women only need to wait 136 more years until we make as much money as men, according to Bloomberg. “The Simple Truth About the Gender Pay Gap,” a report published Thursday by the American Association of University Women, revealed that in 2015, women working full-time in the U.S. were paid, on average, 20 percent less than men. At the rate the pay gap has narrowed between 1960 and 2015, women were expected to earn as much as their male counterparts by 2059. However, the report noted, if progress continues at the slow rate it’s been at since 2001, pay equality won’t be happening anytime soon. The U.S. civilian workforce included almost 149 million workers in 2015: 53 percent men and 47 percent women. Men and women “tend to work in different kinds of jobs,” according to the report. Women are
“disproportionately represented” in education, administrative support, and health-care jobs, while men are similarly represented in construction, maintenance, and production and transportation jobs. “Even though a pay gap exists in nearly every occupational field, jobs traditionally associated with men tend to pay better than traditionally female-dominated jobs that require the same level of skill,” the report said. The report suggested that increasing the number of women working in traditionally male fields “will likely improve wages for women,” but it won’t completely eliminate the pay gap. “Women in male-dominated jobs such as computer programming still face a pay gap compared with their male counterparts, even though women in such jobs may be paid higher salaries than women in traditionally female fields are paid,” the report said. Therefore, the report noted, the pay gap is “real, it’s persistent, and it’s undermining the economic security of American women and their families.”
See you in
2152!
In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders. - Sheryl Sandberg
You’ll Never Work In This Town Again... by Mila Kunis | November 2, 2016
If this is happening to me, it is happening more aggressively to women everywhere.
“You’ll never work in this town again.” A cliché to be sure, but also what a producer threatened when I refused to pose semi-naked on the cover of a men’s magazine to promote our film. I was no longer willing to subject myself to a naïve compromise that I had previously been willing to. “I will never work in this town again?” I was livid, I felt objectified, and for the first time in my career I said “no.” And guess what? The world didn’t end. The film made a lot of money and I did work in this town again, and again, and again. What this producer may never realize is that he spoke aloud the exact fear every woman feels when confronted with gender bias in the workplace. It’s what we are conditioned to believe — that if we speak up, our livelihoods will be threatened; that standing our ground will lead to our demise. We don’t want to be kicked out of the sandbox for being a “bitch.” So we compromise our integrity for the sake of maintaining the status quo and hope that change is coming.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/124130533451821300/
But change is not coming fast enough to help my friends, my peers, or even our children. In fact, a recent study by the American Association of University Women shows that the pay gap is closing at such a slow rate that it will be 136 years before women are paid equally to men. 136 years. And the pay gap is but one clear quantification of the acute undervaluing of the contributions of women in the workplace.
Throughout my career, there have been moments when I have been insulted, sidelined, paid less, creatively ignored, and otherwise diminished based on my gender. And always, I tried to give people the benefit of the doubt; maybe they knew more, maybe they had more experience, maybe there was something I was missing. I taught myself that to succeed as a woman in this industry I had to play by the rules of the boy’s club. But the older I got and the longer I worked in this industry, the more I realized that it’s bullshit! And, worse, that I was complicit in allowing it to happen.
So, I started my own club. I formed a production company with three amazing women. We have been hustling to develop quality television shows with unique voices and perspectives. Since our inception, we have been lucky enough to partner with incredible producers, male and female, who have treated us as true equals and partners. Recently, we signed on to partner with an influential male producer on a project that would shine a light on an important social issue — ironically — inclusivity and our shared human experience.
In the process of pitching this show to a major network, the typical followup emails were sent to executives at this network. In this email chain, this producer chose to email the following: “And Mila is a mega star. One of biggest actors in Hollywood and soon to be Ashton’s wife and baby momma!!!” This is the entirety of his email. Factual inaccuracies aside, he reduced my value to nothing more than my relationship to a successful man and my ability to bear children. It ignored my (and my team’s) significant creative and logistical contributions. We withdrew our involvement in the project. Yes, it is only one small comment. But it’s these very comments that women deal with day in and day out in offices, on calls, and in emails — micro aggressions that devalue the contributions and worth of hard-working women.
I’m done compromising; even more so, I’m done with being compromised.
Subtle gender bias is oftentimes nearly imperceptible, and even wholly undetectable to those who share the bias. It became clear in later emails from this producer that he was totally unaware of why his words were so appalling. What he characterized as a “lighthearted” comment was actually deeply undermining to my contributions and ability to be taken seriously as a creative partner.
I have no interest in vilifying this man. Blind gender biases are embedded in every facet of our life. They are reinforced by our educational institutions: men dominate the figures we study in history, the luminaries of math and science and technology about whom we learn, and the authors of political discourse we are taught to revere. We are inundated with tales of male superiority that blind us to the architecture of our own relationships. The very word “blind” informs us of everything. No one gets upset when a blind person bumps into a wall, but the wall does not cease to yield force. I’m done compromising; even more so, I’m done with being compromised. So from this point forward, when I am confronted with one of these comments, subtle or overt, I will address them head on; I will stop in the moment and do my best to educate. I cannot guarantee
that my objections will be taken to heart, but at least now I am part of creating an environment where there is the opportunity for growth. And if my comments fall on deaf ears, I will choose to walk away. If this is happening to me, it is happening more aggressively to women everywhere. I am fortunate that I have reached a place that I can stop compromising and stand my ground, without fearing how I will put food on my table. I am also fortunate that I have the platform to talk about this experience in the hope of bringing one more voice to the conversation so that women in the workplace feel a little less alone and more able to push back for themselves. I will work in this town again, but I will not work with you.
We are inundated with tales of male superiority that blind us to the architecture of our own relationships.
I will work in this town again, but I will not work with you.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/11118330311127528/
Achieving gender equality requires the engagement of women and men, girls and boys. It is everyone's responsibility. -Ban Ki-moon