#media equity

[sorayachemaly]

This Washington Post page says it all. The two main text stories are about failures of the criminal justice system and attempts to address institutionalized racism that black men and much less talked, about but just as important, black women pay such a high price for.  In the middle of the page is a photograph of a happy young white woman in an ACTUAL bubble. The editor who built this page probably did it completely unconsciously, and yet, there it is. 

The media narrative and framing are not the fault of the woman in this photograph, who had nothing to do with it being put here, but this kind of image and coverage are meaningful. This example would almost be funny if the lack of awareness in the media industry, still, to how framing, word choice, story selection and what passes for journalistic standards, weren’t so consequential. Especially this week, as Sandra Bland’s family and friends try and find answers to her death in prison. Mainly, pages like this continue to be constructed with little or not thought to sociological realities.

Dori Maynard, a long time champion of diversity in journalism,  thought and thought hard about Missing White Woman Syndrome, a well-documented media bias.  Until  industry leaders see its lack of diversity as a fundamental failure of journalistic ethics, this will go on and on. 

[sorayachemaly]

People need to see women on our currency

"You can't be what you can't see," isn't just an empty platitude. Visible currency is part of daily life. Children see it, use it, need it, play with it, earn it, save it, spend it, worry about it and hear adults talk about it. The erasure of women from this media is one of the ways that we cultivate visual gender biases that make it possible for the absence of women in the public sphere to be "normal." People routinely see balance where none exists and think nothing of the near complete absence of women in key areas of the public sphere.

Just because our culture's education system fails us, generation after generation, doesn't mean women haven't always managed to overcome impediments to achieve great things, it just means our cultural influencers ignore women's accomplishments. It's a power play, pure and simple. We generally don't teach children about women, acknowledge the relevance of their labor or give them public recognition. LIKE ON OUR CURRENCY. This is hardly hardly exceptional, however.

Of the 5,193 public, outdoor statues in the United States, a whopping 394 are women.

In Congress' National Statuary Hall there are 100 statues, 99 of whom are men.

Between 2000-2009, 206 people were honored on postage stamps, less than 25%, women.

Not one national public holiday is named for a woman or recognizes a significant event tied to women's equality or revolutionary acts.

And then people ask what girls can do to be more confident and overcome their personal insecurities (#30).

Vote for your choice here at Women on 20s. 

All images copyright Women on 20s, 2015

[sorayachemaly]

Q: Why Isn’t There A Men’s History Month? Really??

March is Women’s History Month, and some people insist on asking: Why isn’t there a Men’s History Month? This is going to be a long month - there are 26 days left and I’m sharing this to save some of us time.   

30 second A: Because men as a class are not symbolically annihilated in our media.Women’s History Month, like Black History Month, is a pragmatic, short-term response to persistent cultural marginalization and misrepresentation. It’s an antidote to systemic erasure. It’s an attempt to both create representation and explain why it’s important.

Image from: http://mrbelloblog.com/2014/02/15/student-resources/womens-history-month/

10-second answer is: We don’t have a Men’s History Month because we don’t need one. Every month is men's history month. 

Despite women’s recent gains, our stories are still produced mainly by men, about men, from men’s perspectives, and for men.

So, for example, in coverage of Syrian refugee camps and their destabilizing effects, sexual assault gets almost no coverage in mainstream media, this despite it being one of theprimary reasons identified by people fleeing their country. Or maybe, our immigration reformwhich, until the issue was forced, concerned itself mainly with finding ways to get highly skilled, educated people into the country instead of the more than 75% of immigrants who are women with children and far less likely to be educated in their home countries because of gender discrimination. Did you know that in a natural disaster, such as flooding, tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes, girls and woman are 14 times more likely to die than boys and men? I’d be willing to bet a whole lot of money that you didn’t because what we allow the media to portray as “gender neutral” information is anything but. There are thousands of these examples globally every day. Today’s news is tomorrow’s history and today’s history was written in exactly these ways. This media imbalance is unhelpful and discriminatory and continues to support an institutionally sexist and racist status quo. 

Men’s voices, experiences and needs are still widely understood to be representative of humanity and women – our voices and experiences and needs, are not.  And, while it is clearly the case that in this country the history of white men’s deering-dos is the backdrop of our institutional lives, the exact same pattern of sexism replicates itself within the developing cultural memories of minority groups and in globally in countries where race does not inform people’s identity and society’s structure the way it does in the United States.  Last week I walked down the hall of a high school where the walls, in celebration of Black History Month, were plastered with flyers celebrating prominent African American men. It was, on that day, also the celebration of Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison’s birthdays. That week was the week that Barbara Jordan was first elected to office. Not a flyer in sight.  The persistent denial of that fact that men’s history is not “our history” and that “mankind” is not universal term for humanity continues to create everyday social harm. 

But, but, but…”Women didn’t do anything in the past worth writing about.”

So. Much. Bullshit.

Women are and always have been plenty busy, engaged, and ambitious and, in the past, many managed to transcend the manifold obstacles to our success. We have, the world over, thousands of years worth of women philosophers, scientists, writers, critics,mathematicians and physicists, historians, technological innovators, labor agitators,politicians and rulers, soldiers, doctors, thinkers, political theorists, social justice leaders, andeducators. Even pirates.

For the most part women have done these things wearing more than our skivvies. It’s just that our work, our lives, our problems, our accomplishments, have been ignored and continue to be excluded.

Women were prohibited from going to school. Barred from voting or running for office. Not allowed to own property. Were property. Sexually preyed upon in state sanctioned ways. Vulnerable to early death, especially through pregnancy and childbirth. Worked to the point of physical and mental exhaustion. Had the fruits of our labor stolen from us in acts of socially sanctioned sexism. Legally denied the right to patent our ideas and inventions.Systemically excluded from public life with malice. Subject to the rule of fathers, husbands, and sons with no recourse to the law. Threatened regularly with violence, as we still areevery day. And routinely censored and bullied simply for having the nerve to express opinions out loud.

But if that’s not evidence enough, here are other places where women are discriminated against:

In children’s books

In children’s television and film programming

In newsrooms

In cable TV

In Hollywood and the film industry

In television programming

In literary magazines

In gaming

In sports

In music, all kinds

In the creation of religious culture (not even wasting time on a link)

In the law

In obituaries

In op-eds

In the art world

In corporate leadership

In Google Doodles (really)

Even in movie crowd scenes

Of course, the internet is filled with women making content every day and this is good, but the Internet by itself is not enough. While many people assume that new technology is automatically egalitarian and progressive, nothing could be further from the truth. Technology is informed by the people who build and control and populate it. So, for example, Wikipedia, an online reservoir for “history” that is increasingly used by people around the globe, is notoriously gender imbalanced. It is the perfect example of how deeply entrenched and complicated systemic bias is—whatever the medium.

But these imbalances are not even the real problem. This is the real problem:

In textbooks, in textbooks, in textbooks

Forget the big, bad, dangerous Internet. The most influential and harmful media environment that kids find themselves in is schools, where they are exposed to traditional textbooks, history lessons, science programs, and library displays, all of which persistently erase diverse contributions to our history and allow the stories of primarily white men to shape people's imaginations and ambitions. Each time a child opens a book and reads a womanless history,
 he or she learns that girls and women are worth less.

I am tired of reading: Where are the women? Where are the women in media? Where are the women in lawmaking? Where are the women in tech? Where are the women in fashion?Where are the women in protests? Where are the women in the administration? Where are the women in film? Where are the women in comedy, medicine, science, advertising, math?

The question isn’t “Where are the women?” Women are here. In large numbers. The question is “Where are the good men who recognize that equal representation in culture is a moral imperative?” And I say men, because men, as a class, dominate leadership and cultural production, and write history.

Whole post is here: http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2014-03-answer-ridiculous-question-isnt-mens-history-month/

From: http://divasanddorks.com/womens-history-month-celebrating-black-women-in-fashion/