Lady Business: Why Geena Davis keeps receipts but avoids confrontation

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the fifty-second issue, published December 13, 2018.
 

Playing Ball

Good news, ladies: Sometimes women do make more money than men! In Hollywood, even! Like when we’re fictional characters:
 

According to findings from the Creative Artists Agency and shift7, a company started by the former United States chief technology officer Megan Smith, the top movies from 2014 to 2017 starring women earned more than male-led films, whether they were made for less than $10 million or for $100 million or more.
 

This new study, it turns out, reinforces something that Geena Davis has been gathering data on for more than a decade.

Yes, that Geena Davis. The Oscar-winning star of Thelma & Louise and A League of Their Own has also spent the past 14 years doing some of the less glamorous, behind-the-scenes work of advocating for diversity: keeping receipts and funding studies. 

 
In 2004, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University, a nonprofit that collects data on and works to advocate for greater on-screen representation of women and girls. And for those who’ve been following this work, the CAA/shift7 findings aren’t that surprising. A report published by the Geena Davis Institute earlier this year found that, at least among “family-rated” films, movies with female lead characters made 38.1 percent more profit, on average, than those with male lead characters.
 
I spoke with Davis for Inc. about her organization’s most recent report, on on-screen representation of women in STEM, and really enjoyed the conversation. Davis was generous with her time on the phone, quick to laugh and even more quick to cite all sorts of data to back up her points.
 
We discussed how watching television with her young daughter inspired Davis to start funding this type of research; why she doesn’t try to play role models, exactly (“If you think about Thelma and Louise, we're the worst role models in the world!”); and how the post-Weinstein #MeToo era has, and hasn’t, changed Hollywood. (She also told me that she’s playing a new character on the next season of GLOW, which I am really looking forward to.)
 
I especially appreciated her nuanced advice on how to advocate for diversity. Davis says she’s found it more effective to be public and non-confrontational in her core mission, to get more women and girls represented in children’s entertainment -- yet she fully supports those who are much more vocal and public about systemic inequities in Hollywood:
 

It is so freeing for women to know that now it's OK to talk about this stuff, [instead of feeling] like, "Well, I don't want people to think I'm difficult to work with" or "I don't want to cause a problem." … So many of my peers and friends are so outspoken about all of this now. Think of all the incredible women leading the way in this space.
 
I've just been quietly doing this privately. I take very private, collegial, "Hey, I bet you didn't realize" kinds of meetings. But there's a whole other level now of profound outspokenness, which is just very exciting and I think will create lasting change.
 
That private, collegial, "Hey, I bet you didn't realize" tactic versus calling public attention to inequity--is one approach more effective than the other?
 
I think the best way to approach unconscious bias is to say, "You didn't know this. This is not me standing and blaming you. This is pointing out something you did not know. Can we work together to make this better?" That works great in that instance.

For conscious bias, all bets are off. You have to confront. You can't quietly say, "I know you're deliberately holding women back, but can I politely ask that you don't?" That doesn't work. So for different circumstances, we need different approaches.

Lady Bits

--Founder. Computer visionary. Startup executive. Venture capitalist. Inventor of the word processor. Possible inventor of computerized airline reservations systems. “Why is this woman not famous?”
 
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