The Skills. Mishal Husain
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Название: The Skills

Автор: Mishal Husain

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Управление, подбор персонала

Серия:

isbn: 9780008220648

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СКАЧАТЬ are described with references to their personal lives that would jump out as ludicrous if used for a man: when the businesswoman Rona Fairhead emerged as the preferred candidate to chair the then BBC Trust, one newspaper headline read: ‘Mother of Three Poised to Lead the BBC.’

      Once you focus on the imagery we consume from an early age, other oddities become apparent. That was the experience of the Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis after she started to watch children’s television and films with her young daughter. ‘I immediately noticed that there seemed to be far more male characters than female characters,’ she later said. ‘This made no sense: why on earth in the twenty-first century would we be showing fictitious worlds bereft of female characters to our children?’5 Deciding that she needed data to convince executives that there was a problem, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004. Its studies have shown that even among animated family films, a ratio of three male speaking characters for every female one prevails and that two types of female characters tend to dominate: the traditional and the ‘hypersexual’. These girls and women might be unusually thin and in sexually revealing clothing, or in animated films they might be depicted with an unnatural body shape, such as an exaggeratedly tiny waist.6

      Earlier on, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel had drawn attention to the portrayal of women in film in her own way, with a 1985 strip in which two women discuss going to the cinema. One has a rule – she’ll only go to see a film with at least two women in it, who talk to each other about something other than a man.7 It sounds basic, but once you start applying what’s come to be called ‘the Bechdel Test’, it is remarkable how few films pass it – only half of those that have ever won the Best Picture Oscar, according to a 2018 BBC analysis, and even then some of those had just one or two instances of conversation that met the requirements.8

      Even where a film is based around a strong female protagonist, she may be outnumbered in terms of her lines. In a study of film dialogue, the data website The Pudding found that was the case in Mulan, where the eponymous heroine’s dragon has considerably more lines than she does. Overall, male characters dominated the dialogue in 73 per cent of Disney/Pixar films analysed, including family favourites such as Toy Story, The Lion King, Monsters, Inc. and The Jungle Book.9 And a study made of films across the world found that women not only have fewer speaking roles than men, but that their characters are less likely to be portrayed having an occupation than women in the real-life workforce of those countries.10

      Thanks to sustained and detailed work by Dr Martha M. Lauzen at San Diego State University, we also know that there has been little change in the presence of women working behind the scenes in the film industry. Her data shows that the number employed as directors, writers, producers, cinematographers and editors hasn’t really budged in twenty years: today, just 11 per cent of directors and 4 per cent of cinematographers are women.11

      Where films do have at least one female director, there is a greater likelihood of other women being employed – a correlation that makes all the difference to someone like Lucinda Coxon, who wrote the 2015 film The Danish Girl, and who needs to find enough work to sustain her livelihood. ‘Directors are really the top of the creative tree in film,’ she says, ‘and the presence or absence of women in that role has a serious knock-on effect.’12

      Thanks to the Harvey Weinstein allegations, the entire industry is under a new degree of scrutiny. Melissa Silverstein, founder of the pressure group Women and Hollywood, says it is rife with ‘toxic masculinity’. ‘This is an industry that is run by men and for men,’ she says. ‘The movies we see have mostly male leads. The women depicted are mostly young, scantily clad and have little agency – all too often they are glorified props.’13

      One of Weinstein’s own accusers painted a chilling picture of how women are widely perceived and used. ‘In this industry, there are directors who abuse their position. They are very influential, that’s how they can do that,’ wrote Léa Seydoux. ‘Another director I worked with would film very long sex scenes that lasted days. He kept watching us, replaying the scenes over and over again in a kind of stupor. It was very gross. If you’re a woman working in the film industry, you have to fight because it is a very misogynistic world. Why else are salaries so unequal? Why do men earn more than women? There is no reason for it to be that way.’14

      Lucinda Coxon believes that everyone consuming the output of this industry, one with the power to tell stories that engage and influence us, should think about the implications of its make-up: ‘The vast, vast majority of dramatic product that you, your friends, family and co-workers have access to, in the cinema or on DVD, Netflix or plain old telly has been shaped by – and often exclusively shaped by – men. And that results in some serious distortions.’ She points to her experience on a BAFTA jury one year, where she watched thirteen hours of prime-time British TV drama and saw female characters brutally attacked again and again, to the point where it was barely noticeable any more. ‘We need to start noticing again. We need to consider how little we learn and what a warped perspective we get on the world when the gender imbalance driving its description is so strong.’

      Reese Witherspoon thinks you can often see the effect of the imbalance in the lines assigned to female characters. ‘I dread reading scripts that have no women involved in their creation,’ she said in 2015. ‘Because inevitably, the girl turns to the guy and says, “What do we do now?”’ She has a point – it’s happened in films from Gone With the Wind to Toy Story to Judi Dench as ‘M’, speaking to James Bond.15 Perhaps it is to make women more likeable, something the screenwriter Cami Delavigne says she is often asked to do in the creative process. ‘It is not “likeable” for a woman to say “No”, to say “You can’t do that”,’ she says. ‘That is not charming. That is not sweet.’16

      When you grow up female all of this surrounds you, but the mirror image is the effect of gendered beliefs and expectations on boys. ‘We stifle the humanity of boys,’ said the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a 2012 speech which was later sampled by Beyoncé and distributed to every school in Sweden. ‘Masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability.’ For girls, the parameters are different: ‘Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage,’ she said. ‘I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a good thing, it can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and not teach boys the same?’17

      I see this overemphasis on marriage frequently among those with a similar south Asian heritage to my own, where women can be perceived as deficient because their private lives are not in line with societal expectations. In Pakistan, there is even evidence to suggest that some young women pursue advanced qualifications, such as medicine, more as a route towards a better marriage than a professional future. ‘It is much easier for girls to get married once they are doctors and many don’t really intend to work,’ said one medical school vice-chancellor, Dr Javed Akram. ‘I know of hundreds and hundreds of female students who have qualified as a doctor or a dentist but they have never touched a patient.’

      Today, while 70 per cent of Pakistani medical students are women, they make up less than a quarter of registered doctors. The barriers range from families frowning on daughters-in-law going out to work, to the practical – childcare, transport and security.18

      In the West, too, there are generational shifts in women’s expectations. Gail Rebuck, the publishing executive whose company was behind Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, contrasts her experience with that of her mother. ‘For my generation it was all about escaping from our mothers’ shattered dreams,’ she says. ‘Most of them were products of the 1950s, intelligent women and absolutely capable, but the mores of the day dictated that as soon as they got married they would be at home bringing up the family. We grew up with that sense of unfulfilled possibility, almost a silent rage.’

      Gail СКАЧАТЬ