Geena Davis Gender Equality Job Is Not Yet Done

The job of creating gender equality was not yet done

Geena Davis

Geena Davis is an activist for women rights. In 2006 she founded The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Her non-profit commissioned the largest research project on gender in film and television ever undertaken.

Recently, the Oscar winning actress opened about the equality between men and women.

“I just gave a commencement address at a local girls’ high school and one point I made was to realize that that the job of creating gender equality was not yet done. There’s a tendency for the younger generation to think that the women’s movement made enormous progress and that we’re pretty much set, you know, we’re good. And certainly college girls don’t want to hear anything about feminism. But the facts are not so good. While the girls may enter various fields at 50 percent as compared to the boys, even higher in some cases, that percentage drops off severely as early as the very first level of promotion. And then it’s like a pyramid that gets very skinny at the top, at the CEO level and the board level. So I asked them to be conscious of this, to notice the numbers and to proceed with that consciousness. Yes, this goes for girls and boys. I have spoken to this at co-ed schools too. It is equally important for boys to see girls and women taking up half the space in this world. And to become very accustomed to the idea that we are sharing things equally. If we’re not showing boys and girls that they share the sandbox equally when they are young, that girls have the same value as boys, then it’s never going to change. It’s way better to aim at our children’s first impressions of our culture than to undo the damage that’s already done by the time they are teenagers or older”, she said.