What is a Discriminatory Landscape? How Do We Change It?
Channel: Mercer
Date: 2018-04-06

Mercer | https://goo.gl/rPDhV8 | Mercer WWT When Women Thrive Keynote Cathy Schulman FD1 Media Entertainment

Reframe is something that I co founded with Keri Putnam, who's the executive director of Sundance Institute who will be here later this afternoon to talk about culture change. Let’s about the conflation that's happening between sexual harassment, sexual assault and the discriminatory behaviors leading to the gender parity needs that need to be addressed. I'm going to focus us on the media industry because the sexual harassment crisis is obviously worldwide. Sexual harassment comes in 2 forms. Legally that is either quid pro quo, which means if you do this, you get that, or it comes in the form and an unsafe workplace. Meaning you cannot continue your work without facing the fact that you're under sexual pressures. That's a significant problem in Hollywood. when from the top up you're seeing behavior that favors men, disfavors women, lack of inclusion of women environments are created that in fact harbor bad behavior. I call October Fifth Age Day. That's when the first big story from the New York Times hit. Um, the sad story about Harvey Weinstein and obviously what's going on between October fifth and today is, is momentous. job to job for women, which by the way statistically is five to seven years for a woman working in the gate-keeping positions and film and television. That means producers, writers, directors, cinematographers, editors and often times composers. The gap for work and the way they fall out as a five to seven year gap where it's a one to three year gap, which is bad enough by the way, for men, hard to keep yourself in the business economically. There's an absolutely perceptible blowback regarding it's a fear if I spend time alone with a younger or more emerging person in my company and I'm a man and there are women. What if I get accused? Terrible fear of trial by press. a new cronyism with guys sticking together, you know, so as to avoid losing position to, to women, um, and also getting in trouble by women. And then another negative I would even say in a slight blowback is in fighting amongst women in various different groups. a graph reflecting the last 10 years. At the bottom you see 4% of women directing the top grossing 100 films. This yeaR The number is 8%, which is an excellent increase, but if you include this year with its former 9 years, you're still at 4% and only worse for the other gate-keeping positions. the Annenberg research by Stacy Smith and we partner during that same period with the Sundance Institute to spend three years raising awareness or what was happening in the industry and also making this research available within the industry and outside of it. we had collected about 90k data points about these subject matter and had also done 1500 industry and interviews with men and women with over 7 years worth of experience.

Our deep expertise, powerful insights, and real-world solutions help the people and organizations we serve take steps today to secure a better tomorrow. 

- - - - - - -
Mercer Website:
https://goo.gl/rPDhV8 
 
Twitter: @mercer
https://twitter.com/mercer

Facebook: @MercerInsights
https://www.facebook.com/MercerInsights/

YouTube: mercervideo
https://youtube.com/mercervideo