I love the Women’s Media Center. If you’ve never heard of them, you should probably check them out immediately because they’re doing some really wonderful work making women more visible and powerful in the media. To learn more about what they do, click here or read my interview with Carol Jenkins, the WMC’s founding President, here. The video I want to feature today, though, is from when the WMC went to the Sundance Film Festival to raise awareness about gender disparity in filmmaking. Good stuff.
It’s no secret that the media is dominated by men. The sexist treatment of Clinton and Palin in the election coverage is only one example of how women are viewed as less seriously as men, and certainly as less important in what we consider news. And while the treatment of women in news coverage is abominable, the story behind the scenes in news rooms isn’t much better.
Carol Jenkins, the founding president of the Women’s Media Center, knows all about it, and is working hard to combat it. The Women’s Media Center is a nonprofit advocacy organization that was founded in 2004 to make women more powerful in the media. She is also an Emmy award winning former television anchor and correspondent.
This is so ridiculous. The statement they’re referring to? Sotomayor said in a speech, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Okay, to me it’s pretty clear that she’s talking about how life experiences shape who you are in your career, and how her background as a Latina woman is an important addition to white men who historically have had the most power in her field. No, it did not come out nicely. But Sonia Sotomayor is very clearly not a racist. I’m pretty sure most people, who are not simply looking for things to pick on her for, can see she was not trying to say…
Almost 2 weeks ago, the NCRW had a conference that featured many terrific panelists. One of the best ones in my opinion was the panel on Popular Culture and Gender Images. The panelists included Latoya Peterson from racialicious (I want to be her best friend),
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