We're showing kids a world that is very scantily populated with women and female characters. They should see female characters taking up half the planet, which we do.
Geena DavisRead
It's really important for boys to see that girls take up half of the planet - which we do.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing women's significant presence and contributions in society.
Geena Davis highlights the need for boys to understand that girls are equal participants in the world, constituting half of the population. This awareness is crucial for fostering respect and equality between genders and promoting a more balanced perspective on gender roles.
In practice
In a school presentation on gender equality, one could use this quote to illustrate the significance of female representation.
We're showing kids a world that is very scantily populated with women and female characters. They should see female characters taking up half the planet, which we do.
Having been in some roles that really resonated with women, I became hyper-aware of how women are represented in Hollywood.
We are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space.
When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.
The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life.
If you're one of the only women on a set - if it's you and a bunch of men - you feel like your value doesn't come from your thoughts and your talent and what you say: your value comes from how you look and how you're perceived by the men around you.
For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that's taking something that potentially should be celebrated - a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way - that's taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.
When I started, the press credentials said 'No women or children in the press box,' ... There are a lot of things in the workplace that you can attempt to hide, and I could not hide the fact that I was a woman. I was always the only woman in the press box, and they didn't even have ladies rooms.
The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked.
Girls are 50% of the population. We deserve to represent 50% of the heroes.
There is nothing of greater importance to the well-being of society at large - of man as well as woman - than the true proper position of woman.
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