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DDP Talks To

"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery

Examining other art forms with historic issues in hiring women: theater, symphonic/classical music, opera. Also including more contemporary fields: lack of women in country music, hip hop, contemporary pop music, and other genres.

SBNation: Nike’s incredible new ‘Just Do It’ campaign gives women the spotlight

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By James Dator

24 February 2019

Nike’s new “Just Do It” campaign will air during the Oscars on Sunday night with an ad titled “Dream Crazier,” narrated by Serena Williams.

The campaign focuses on the pejoratives lobbed at women in the world of sports. Passion becomes unhinged, angry becomes hysterical and daring to be different is “crazy.” Told through 24 different women, the ad spans the sports landscape to show us the athletes who are daring to do what people thought impossible.

In the order of their appearance the athletes are:

  • Sarah Reinertsen – paratriathlete
  • Victoria Azarenka – Tennis
  • Sam Gordon – Football
  • Alex Morgan, Julie Ertz, Alyssa Naeher- USWNT Soccer
  • Megan Rapinoe – USWNT Soccer
  • Li Na – Tennis
  • Sue Bird — WNBA
  • Caster Semenya -Track & Field
  • Diana Taurasi – Basketball
  • Cheryl Reeve – Basketball coach
  • Simona Halep – Tennis
  • Marlen Esparza – Boxing
  • Lisa Leslie – WNBA
  • Becky Hammon – NBA coach
  • Ibtihaj Mohammad – fencing
  • Simone Manuel – Swim
  • Chloe Kim – Snowboarding
  • Serena Williams – Tennis
  • Sam Kerr – Soccer
  • Tatyana McFadden – Paralympics
  • Sky Brown – Skate
  • Simone Biles – Gymnastics
  • Olivia Moultrie – Soccer

Read the full article and watch the video on SBNation.

AP Photo

Daily Sabah: #MeToo – Emma Thompson refuses to work with disgraced ex-Pixar exec John Lasseter

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26 February 2019

In a letter to Skydance Media, Emma Thompson outlined why she refused to work with the former Pixar executive John Lasseter and was withdrawing from the animated film “Luck.”

Thompson departed the project last month shortly after Skydance chief executive David Ellison hired Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder and former Walt Disney Co. animation chief. Lasseter last year was forced out at Disney after acknowledging “missteps” in his behavior with female employees.

In her letter to Ellison , Thompson said she felt it was “very odd to me that you and your company would consider hiring someone with Mr. Lasseter’s pattern of misconduct given the present climate.”

“If a man has been touching women inappropriately for decades, why would a woman want to work for him if the only reason he’s not touching them inappropriately now is that it says in his contract that he must behave ‘professionally’?” wrote Thompson. “If a man has made women at his companies feel undervalued and disrespected for decades, why should the women at his new company think that any respect he shows them is anything other than an act that he’s required to perform by his coach, his therapist and his employment agreement?”

A representative for Thompson confirmed the letter Tuesday, which was first published in The Los Angeles Times. A spokesperson for Skydance declined to comment.

Lasseter’s hiring provoked a backlash from some who said the animation executive didn’t deserve a second chance so quickly. Time’s Up, the nonprofit organization formed to combat sexual harassment and gender inequality in Hollywood and elsewhere, said his hiring “endorses and perpetuates a broken system that allows powerful men to act without consequence.”

Read the full article on Daily Sabah.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy – Preventing Sexual Harassment and Promoting Gender Equity: 5 Ways to Get Started

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As the Chronicle has documented, sexual harassment at nonprofits is a major challenge. Fundraisers face harassment by donors, and allegations of abuse in the workplace have led to resignations at more than one organization.

Yet there is cause for hope.

Some nonprofit leaders are addressing inequities and seeking solutions, as Katie Leonberger, president of Community Resource Exchange, details in a new article entitled Preventing Sexual Harassment and Promoting Gender Equity: 5 Ways to Get Started.

And these two articles from the archives offer additional guidance for leaders seeking to stop discrimination and abuse:
Ending Harassment at Nonprofits Means Changing Office Culture Experts Say 
5 Steps Nonprofits Can Take to Combat Sexual Harassment.

Read the articles in the links above, or visit The Chronicle of Philanthropy resources.

Bloomberg: Brainard Says Fed Must Do More to Boost Diversity in Its Ranks

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By Alister Bull

23 February 2019

Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard said the U.S. central bank must improve its recruitment of women and people from minority backgrounds because greater diversity leads to better policy decisions.

Noting that it was more than a century after the Fed’s creation that the one of its 12 regional banks was headed by an African American — Raphael Bostic, who became president of the Atlanta Fed in 2017 — Brainard said “we need to do better.”

“To achieve our goals, we will need to improve the diversity of the economics ecosystem more broadly,” Brainard told a conference in Washington on Saturday to commemorate Sadie T. M. Alexander, the first African American woman to gain a Ph.D in economics.

The Fed hires one of every 25 “newly minted” economics Ph.Ds in the U.S. each year, Brainard said, and therefore has “a significant stake in the diversity and vibrancy of the economics profession overall.”

The Fed gained its first woman leader when Janet Yellen took the helm in 2014. She was passed over for a second term when President Donald Trump picked Jerome Powell to succeed her in 2018. Women remain a minority of the central bank’s leadership.

Read the full article in Bloomberg.

The Asian Age: India looks to address the fine lines around #MeToo in dance

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By Sharon Lowen

19 February 2019

The blanket of silence is starting to lift in the dance world. When the explosive revelations regarding powerful and high-profile individuals in the US were not only revealed but believed, our collective conscious shifted.

Disquieting past memories resurfaced for many, perhaps for most women in dance as well as a significant number of men. From sharing personal stories with those near and dear, the conversations have expanded to creating a dialogue within the performing arts community to initiate new steps to protect against sexual harassment. Seeds of courage began to sprout with an awareness of if not now, when? It’s absolutely remarkable that the conservative sabhas of Chennai have united to ban performing artists who have been credibly called out.

In Delhi, a meeting of dance and theatre practitioners, academics, lawyers, NGOs and human rights activists was met courtesy the Max Meuller Bhavan Library, New Delhi, and spearheaded by Mandeep Raikhy and Manishikha Baul. Their goal is Working Toward a Safe Performing Arts Sector.

Rather than calling out individuals who misuse power equations, the focus was on articulating “best practices” for working environments in the performing arts. Clearly, organisations, institutions, studios, and even individual performance collectives. This initial brainstorming session covered a lot of ground to look at sexual harassment and consent starting with (i) What is the definition? (ii) To whom does it apply? and (iii) What then is the redressal mechanism? Also, the differing environments: within organisations that might require an internal complaints committee or an umbrella committee addressing issues across organisations and collaborative projects.

Read the full article in The Asian Age.

The Guardian: If the gender pay gap is a ‘feminist myth’, then why not disclose salaries?

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By Arwa Mahdawi

2 February 2019

Equal pay requires honest discussions

The gender pay gap, as every right-thinking person knows, is a feminist myth. Those figures you’ve seen about white women earning around 80% of what white men make, and black women earning just 61%, are probably wrong. And if they’re not, then, as many conservatives have pointed out, there are rational explanations for the disparity. Such as the fact that, as Jordan Peterson has explained, women are just more agreeable than men, meaning they don’t ask for more money. Which is a very agreeable explanation if you don’t want to confront structural inequality.

An image of Mahdawi for The Guardian. Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and brand strategist based in New York. Follow her on Twitter @ArwaM

While many on the right insist the gender pay gap doesn’t exist, they also appear keen to block legislation that would strengthen equal pay protection and make it easier for employees to share wage information. Which would appear to be a contradictory position. As congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Wednesday “If ‘the wage gap is a myth’ as some allege, then workplaces should have no problem with workers disclosing our salaries with one another.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet followed a news conference in which she, along with other Democrats, re-introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act, which strives to close the gender wage gap by giving women tools to challenge unequal pay. For example, it would stop employers retaliating against workers who discuss their salaries with each other. The bill was first introduced in 1997, but has been repeatedly blocked by Republicans.

While the pay gap has narrowed since 1980, not much progress has been made in the last 15 years. Arguably, one reason for this is the lack of transparency around pay. Most of us don’t know how much our colleagues make, which makes it easier for companies to ignore the issue. Indeed, Lean In’s 2018 Black Women’s Equal Pay Survey found that 50% of Americans aren’t aware of pay gap between black and white women, and hiring managers are also ignorant of the disparity.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

The Guardian: Gender pay gap: companies under pressure to act in 2019

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By Alexandra Topping

1 January 2019

It was billed as the biggest legislative game-changer for working women since the Equal Pay Act made it illegal to pay people of different sexes differently for the same job in 1970.

Business leaders ‘don’t want the reputational risk of not being seen to improve’, said one expert.
Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA

And for once, the hype may not have been overstated. Groundbreaking legislation that forced companies to reveal their gender pay gaps in 2018 for the first time has had an immediate and wide-ranging effect, but companies are likely to come under increased pressure to narrow the gap in 2019, according to data and experts.

Figures from the Confederation of British Industry’s (CBI) employmenttrends survey show 93% of businesses are taking action to close the gender pay gap and increase diversity in their workforces, compared with 62% who were asked a similar question in 2017. Companies increasingly appear to recognise the business case for building a diverse workforce, with 60% saying it helps attract and retain staff, while half said it increased skills in the workforce.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

The Guardian: Can software bring women’s pay up to men’s? This tech entrepreneur thinks so

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By David Hillier

28 November 2018

Currently, the World Economic Forum predicts it could take 217 years to close the global gender pay gap, but Zara Nanu, a tech entrepreneur, thinks she can do it in less than 20.

Nanu grew up in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova that was part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. Now, she’s in Bristol where she’s been based for 11 years, tackling pay inequality with Gapsquare, her cloud-based software business.

Gapsquare uses machine learning to analyse a company’s gender pay gap and flag opportunities to close it as they arise. For example, it can highlight when certain employees are not progressing as fast as their peers, as well as when external male candidates are recruited into more senior roles. It can also analyse at department level to see if there are certain grades which are more difficult for women or ethnic minorities to pass.

To date, she’s analysed the wages of more than 270,000 employees in the UK, and Gapsquare counts Vodafone, Condé Nast and Serco among its clients. The company is presenting in France this month, having recently finished a series of meetings and presentations in Silicon Valley, the belly of the global tech beast. “I think America is ready for us,” she says, “maybe more so than the UK. In the Bay area there are so many more women in tech than the UK.” 

Nanu points to Soviet attitudes to gender equality as having a formative effect. “We had quotas around women in parliament, quotas around representation of women in any sector. Childcare was free, so my mum could go back to work six months after giving birth. When I came to the UK [in 2007] it felt like, to some extent, I was going back in time in terms of gender equality.”

Read the full article in The Guardian.

New York Times: Musician Ryan Adams dangled success. Women say they paid a price.

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By Joe Coscarelli and Melena Ryzik

13 February 2019

For nearly two decades, Ryan Adams, one of the most prolific singer-songwriters of his generation, has been heralded as a mercurial creative genius and a respected industry tastemaker.

Ryan Adams in 2017. A prolific singer-songwriter with his own label and studio, he is also known to communicate directly with fans and critics on social media. Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times

Equal parts punk-rock folk hero and romantic troubadour, Adams, 44, has 16 albums and seven Grammy nominations to his name. He has overseen music by Willie Nelson, written a Tim McGraw hit and recorded with John Mayer.

He has also taken a special interest in the trajectory of female artists, especially younger ones, championing them onstage, across social media and in the studio, where his stamp of approval can jump-start careers.

Some now say that Adams’s rock-star patronage masked a darker reality. In interviews, seven women and more than a dozen associates described a pattern of manipulative behavior in which Adams dangled career opportunities while simultaneously pursuing female artists for sex. 

Read the full article in the New York Times.

New York Times: Girls Get Tech. They Just Need Others to Believe It.

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By Maya Salam

12 February 2019

Maya Salam’s article for the New York Times’ In Her Words column touched on the growing exposure of young girls to tech and how it levels the playing field (or doesn’t) for their future opportunities in the field. Read the following excerpt:

Research by the Girl Scout Research Institute, out this week, drove that point home — showcasing through a survey of 2,900 girls and boys ages 5 to 17 (along with their parents) how access to smartphones, tablets, laptops and gaming devices helps put girls on par with boys when it comes to tech, or exceed them in some respects.

Among the study’s most fascinating takeaways:

Boys play games for fun, while girls use tech to learn. The vast majority of children use their devices to watch videos and movies, listen to music and to play games. But while boys are more likely than girls to play games for fun — 81 percent versus 72 percent — girls are playing to learn, the study found. Girls also read books and articles on devices more than boys do, 40 percent compared with 28 percent. And girls are more inclined to use technology to create something new, whether it be videos or coding projects; to discover a new talent or interest; or to connect to social issues.

Still, boys remain more confident in their skills. Even if girls are spending more time learning, it’s boys who are more likely to believe they are the tech experts of their families, 53 percent versus 38 percent of girls. Parents may have something to do with that: In the study, they tended to give sons more credit for figuring out new technology on their own while reporting that their daughters learn technology from someone else, whether it be a parent, sibling or friend.


Read the full article in the New York Times.