She said she would try doing it like the rest of us at Google’s Solve for X retreat, and speak on stage without notes… Then she made a conspicuous look to the hand. =)
Summary of her talk on gender in media below.
Eyes!
“Yes, I admit I did a movie called Earth Girls are Easy, but please put that one title aside and take me seriously.”
“I was watching children’s titles with my daughter when she was age two, and I have a spidey-sense on female roles in media. There were so few girls and women in the programs made for children. When I spoke with media executives, they uniformly told me ‘that problem has been fixed.’ I had to open their eyes. This is when I found my calling as a data hound.”
She hired teams to count faces in movies, from lead roles, to speaking parts to crowd scenes.
“When you look at the important sectors of society, you find a peculiar leveling out of women at 17% of the total. Congress 17%, narrators of movies, Fortune 500 Boards, cardiac surgeons, members of the animator’s guild – all 17%. So we counted female faces in crowd scenes and group scenes in movies. 17%.”
(afterward, a NASA astronaut mentioned that she believes NASA is just under 20% female – and she wants to go back and check the numbers. And of course, when she was on the ISS, it was 17% female. “I never thought of being an astronaut until I met Sally Ride in college. I thought to myself: I want her job.”)
“When you see women on TV and film, career choices skyrocket. We have plenty of women becoming forensic scientists now. We need no further work to get them in TV roles.”
“But in other STEM roles, women are just 6% to the total. And at the current pace of change, we would reach parity in 700 years. I think we can cut that in half!” [laughter]
Hah! Somebody stole my slide! Ever since even in days of yore BP (Before Powerpoint) I had a foil for use with overhead projectors containing 3 circles as shown here. Part of my standard survival kit – I always had it available for conferences, seminars, sales meetings, strategy sessions, kickoff meetings etc. I could put up this slide and wax eloquent on most any subject as the occasion demanded, from three minutes to an hour, and give the appearance that I had given the matter a great deal of thought and preparation.
The advantage of foils was that you could scribble on them in mid-lecture (label the circles, add flow vectors and sundry learned Greek letters) as befitting the subject du jour.
Come to think of it, I stole this slide from somebody at either Bell Labs or MITRE Corp – not sure which. Glad to see it has survived even unto the 21st century
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jitze1942] I have learned something new and valuable at the master’s feet. Pada namaste!
i was wasting time on the internets and stumbled across (well, actually sought out) a website that purports to know the IQ’s of famous people. Geena Davis, according to this website, has an IQ higher than Einstein’s. however, before you get too excited, so allegedly does Madonna. Sharon Stone was also on top of Einstein.
mrwaterslide, imagine if those intellects had been turned to more choices, if they had brought us to say 18%. We’d be missing some exciting music and movies without their number 1s.
But clearly they aren’t the only ones. Missing around 33% (give or take a few who are actively nursing their babies at the current moment, but they’ll be finished in 30 minutes).
Every time one says he, or guys without actual inclusion, it matters. It matters because we are not in your brain at that moment, and therefore not part of belonging to the solution. Whatever the context.
oh, [http://www.flickr.com/photos/25542661@N06] , i suppose, coming from me, my comment did come out sounding sexist, and i didn’t really mean it that way. i probably should have gone on to point out that, in the same survey, George W Bush was listed as having a higher IQ than Lincoln.
i wasn’t meaning to denigrate Miss Davis @ all. i am a little skeptical about Miss Stone’s being a genius; the assets she has displayed have more often been of the baser sort than the intellectual. at very least, being as smart as she purportedly is, she should have been picking better roles. but your point is well taken. i will strive for more inclusiveness in my expression. i might also say that i have dated a fair number of women who were palpably (and sometimes painfully) smarter than i am. those times in my life were kind of exhilarating, heady, as though i had climbed up too high on some lovely mountain and was struggling to get enough oxygen. i think most of those women went on to find lovers with a little greater lung capacity, and have subsequently ascended peaks that are out of my ken.
you are right — girls, young women, all people, all skin-tones, all gender preferences, all religious inclinations (well, i do have some problems with the radical proselytizing religions, but we’ll save that for another day), we all should be thrown together in a big pot of love and possibility and equality and opportunity and told "have at it. let’s see what you can come up with." with very liberal policies regarding the needs of nursing mothers and the responsibilities of new fathers, and allowances for the infirmities of age (my own vantage, increasingly, as the days go by) and irrational exuberance of youth.
we’re kind of like Mickey Mantle, us, the people of the world: our strength and power and speed and grace are awe-inspiring — but just imagine what Could Be, without all the self-imposed handicaps and shackles we take on ourselves, or force on others. we, the world, we could all be really something, if love ruled as it should (and by love, of course i mean of the Divine sort, not the earthly sort. though there’s nothing wrong with a little romance, this Wednesday before Valentine’s)
That was fun to read…. a nugget of sculpted prose, borderline poetry… thanks.
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jitze1942] — the Powerpoint crutch is quite limiting. For my talk at this event, I punted on it for the first time in a long time, and it changes the fluidity of the presenter and the focus of the audience. Larry Lessig has a great hybrid style, with just a word or two on any one slide in a retro-typewriter font… perhaps serving as a memory aid (versus notes on the palm) and simple tool for cognitive boldface
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] Indeed – Powerpoint is misused so often – it makes me cringe… The bulletted list (with indented sub-bullets) where the audience can read the whole slide within 47 millisecs of it appearing, then immediately mentally interpolates and extrapolates the accompanying words and then zones out pending next slide. Far better just a word or two (or pure graphics) where the speaker uses them as an aide to a dance of seven veils, shaping and revealing the message in a controlled fashion to a satisfying dénouement.
A word of caution for those thinking of using this slide (3 circles) – I was once sharply criticized for using almost this very slide (but with the caption "X marks the spot"). It was deemed to be a not very subtle subliminal representation of the view enjoyed during (what was euphemistically referred to as) a "rear docking maneuver". Never been able to see this slide again without that thought distracting me…. A dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Curious to stumble on this after the LOTR project (lotrproject.com/statistics/). Tolkien was rather progressive at 19%.
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