Women, Inequality and Media Work

Anne O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429786112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie sociale

Women, Inequality and Media Work investigates how women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries.

Examining women's place in the production of media is vital to understanding the broader and related question of how women are (mis)represented in media content. This book goes behind the camera to explore the world of women working in media industries and unpacks the systemic gender inequality that they experience at work. It argues that women internalize their experience of gender inequality by adopting various beliefs: whether it is that gender does not matter in the workplace; that the workplace is now post-feminist; or by adopting a sense of self as liminal, neither fully included nor excluded from the industry.

Drawing on detailed academic research and empirical investigation, Women, Inequality and Media Work is an important and timely book for students, researchers and those working in media industries.

1

MEDIA WORK AND GENDER

Breaking silence

The Harvey Weinstein sexual assault cases in the United States, the subsequent social media campaign #MeToo, and the award, by Time magazine, of ‘Person of the Year 2017’ to the Silence Breakers (Zacharek et al., 2017), demonstrates the sheer volume of women who have experienced sexual harassment at work. The Weinstein case revolved around actress Ashley Judd’s meeting with the head of Miramax film studio in a Beverly Hills hotel in 1997 where Weinstein engaged in coercive bargaining, asking ‘if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower’ (Kantor and Twohey, 2017). Judd immediately told colleagues what had happened and many film workers admitted that the studio executive’s behavior was an ‘open secret’ in the industry. Twenty years later Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of the New York Times broke the story, based on interviews with Judd and eight additional women, who described various harassing behaviors by Weinstein. Emily Nestor was told that if she accepted Weinstein’s sexual advances he would ‘boost her career’ (Kantor and Twohey, 2017). Lauren O’Connor issued a memo to several executives at the Weinstein Company asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by her boss, but the Board failed to investigate. Ambra Battilana called the police after Weinstein had grabbed her breasts and put his hands up her skirt (Kantor and Twohey, 2017). Allegations against Weinstein stretched over nearly three decades. He had reached settlements with at least eight women, and while dozens of Weinstein’s former and current employees knew of harassing conduct, only a handful had ever confronted him. The cover-ups were systemic, contracts with the Weinstein Company had clauses saying employees could not criticize the company or its leaders in a way that could harm ‘any employee’s personal reputation’ (Kantor and Twohey, 2017). Judd had finally spoken out on record because she deemed it ‘beyond time to have the conversation publicly’ (Kantor and Twohey, 2017).

In Ireland, a similar conversation was instigated when a theater writer and director, Grace Dyas, publicly accused Michael Colgan, director of the Gate Theatre, of using threatening and abusive language toward her (Dyas, 2017). The incident occurred at a social gathering, following the launch of the Dublin Theatre Festival, in 2016 where Colgan said to Dyas ‘You’ve lost so much weight, I’d almost have sex with you’. Dyas responded immediately, telling Colgan, ‘It’s not an appropriate thing for a man in his sixties, a cultural leader, to say to a young female director at a professional occasion’. Dyas publicly revealed the incident in a blog post a year later (Dyas, 2017). She wrote that she ‘wanted to complain to his Board. I wanted to write an article … But more senior arts professionals told me not to, they warned me, “He could ruin your life”’ (Dyas, 2017). Following Dyas’s post another seven women shared their stories of how Colgan had made sexualized comments and bullied them. While Dyas had been unable to publish her allegations in mainstream media for fear of a defamation suit, Colgan had an article published in the Sunday Independent to respond to the allegations. He said that through ‘misjudged behavior’ he had cased upset to some of his former co-workers and was truly sorry (Independent.ie, 2017b). He also complained that his behavior should not be equated with sexual crimes, that he had been the subject of insinuations and had been put on a public online trial (Independent.ie, 2017b).

While set apart by five thousand miles, in locations that appear quite different, Hollywood and Dublin, the site of a multimillion-dollar film industry on the one hand and a small Irish theater on the other, these cases share much in common. Obviously, both situations saw men with power act in abusive ways toward women with less power. Both perpetrators traded on women’s vulnerability to reputational terrorism, their fear that their hard-fought reputations and future work prospects would be in tatters if they dared challenge the figureheads in their industries. In both cases, the women concerned had no recourse to any official, collective representation within their industries. Neither woman could initially convince the mainstream media to carry their story because of the risk of defamation suits. Interestingly, in both instances, once the hard task of making the revelations public was done there was a general acknowledgment that ‘everyone’ knew. Much as Weinstein’s behavior was an open ‘secret’ with seemingly willing participants facilitating the abuse, similarly with Colgan ‘a number of people in positions of power aided and abetted him at worst, and at best, did nothing to intervene … But everyone knew’ (Broadsheet.ie, 2017). As a union organizer with Irish Equity noted, ‘Nobody made a specific complaint to me … but the general language was that there were open secrets about particular individuals and that everybody knew, but nobody said it’ (Independent.ie, 2017a). Both stories illustrate the power of fear and the resultant silence that almost invariably accompanies the perpetration of sexual harassment and abuse by those with power.

And yet, against the odds, courageous women do speak up, and speak up in droves, pointing to the fact that misogyny, sexism, discrimination and abuse are widespread and commonplace. If anyone was still under the illusion post-Weinstein that there was gender equality in the film or arts worlds, the #MeToo campaign, adopted from Tarana Burke’s decade-long grassroots campaign to promote ‘empowerment through empathy’ among women of color who have experience sexual abuse (Ohlheiser, 2017), disabused them of that notion. The post-Weinstein iteration of #MeToo pointed out that even the most privileged white women, stars of Hollywood, were vulnerable to abuse and shame. It also showed how widespread and everyday were women’s experiences of abuse, with literally millions of women tweeting the hashtag. Burke’s observations on the latest #MeToo viral campaign noted that while ‘It creates hope and inspiration, which are needed, she knows from experience that they are only sustained by work’ (Ohlheiser, 2017). One of the things that concerns Burke about the spread of #MeToo is whether those who helped to inspire women to disclose their stories of survival are prepared for what comes next. So, what does come next, what do we do now?

Reese Witherspoon has already offered an entertaining response to the question ‘What do we do now?’ in her acceptance speech for the Glamour ‘Woman of the Year Award’ in 2015. She explains that in almost every film script she sees, that has not been written by a woman, there is a line in it with a damsel in distress, asking of a man, generally in a breathless voice, ‘What do we do now?’. Witherspoon is clear that in real life no woman ever turned to a man for a plan and an answer to the question of what we do now. And this is all the more so with the problem of gender inequality in screen production. What happens next should not be decided by those in power who have presided over systemic gender inequality and discrimination for decades, the way forward lies with women screen workers themselves.

In order to bring about change women need to name and understand the exact ways in which they experience gender inequality in media work. Women need to be clear about defining the problem and knowing what precisely needs to be addressed. They need to be clear about how much of the industry needs to change, and how radical the change needs to be, if screen production is to genuinely include women. We need to know that women do not lack confidence, they experience exclusion. We need also to understand how women have survived for so long in an industry that fails utterly to value them. We need to honor their agency and resilience and document how they inhabit their biased and discriminatory working worlds and even manage to derive great joy from their work. And finally, we need to be clear about what women value in media work and how we can nurture those aspects of screen production that can create a better industry, one that women are willing to engage with, one where they are, simply, equal. We need to start a fully researched and evidence-based conversation about gender inequality in media work, how women survive it and how the sector can be reinvented to better meet women’s needs and better honor their contributions. Ireland may offer a useful site for such a case study because it is a microcosm of the global sector at large, while also offering some aspects of film and television production that may prove specific to Ireland as a place. Understanding how gender intersects with screen production while basing that study in one place, Ireland, raises some tensions as to what role place plays in understanding production and in the gendered dynamics of work in film and television.

Ireland and screen production

Doreen Massey (1991) describes in ‘A Global Sense of Place’ how much of what is written about place now emphasizes the post-industrial intensification of capitalism and a correlating time–space compression, which acts to reduce the significance of specific places or turn them into ‘flat’ spaces. Massey argues against this essentialized idea of space and place as determined only by the actions of capital or experiences of the economy alone. Consequently, Massey invites an understanding of place as not static but processual, as not having boundaries or simple enclosures but as ‘outward-looking’ and linked to the outside that is part of what constitutes a place (1991:24). The approach to Ireland as a place in which to understand women’s position in screen production tries to embrace this spirit of a global sense of place. The screen production sector in Ireland is not homogenous, fixed and singular but rather changing, momentarily and over time. It is complex in terms of what screen production means or does culturally, historically and economically at any given point in time. Ireland, as a site of analysis, is impossible to ‘freeze frame’ in order to generate a gendered understanding that is free of the context of place, society, culture and economy. All the claims that are made about gender may prevail internationally but they are also tied to the specifics of the Irish context and so it is important to briefly map some of the key characteristics that Ireland as a place reveals as a ‘meeting place of social relations, movements and communications in a particular unique point of intersection’ (Massey, 1991:28). Studying Ireland does not mean that nothing can be learned for other places. Some of the key characteristics, relations, experiences and understandings will also exist elsewhere and perhaps on a larger scale than what is described for Ireland. The sense of place offered here is therefore ‘extroverted’, it includes ‘a consciousness of links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local’ (Massey, 1991:28). Ireland becomes relevant to the world beyond because it offers a story or an account of real relations in a local place set in a wider geographical context. This understanding of Ireland as a specific place of screen production acknowledges that the sector interacts with regimes of global and national capitalist accumulation, while screen production is also understood as a national cultural institution.

To some extent Ireland can be read as a place affected by capitalism’s time–space compressions. Ireland is a small open economy with a history of economic boom–bust cycles and recurring and severe unemployment crises (Ó Riain, 2014). State development agencies have in the past used cultural industries as key sectors of employment generation and revenue sources (O’ Brien, 2011). Consequently, the Irish state seeks to insert Ireland in global film and television production networks, in order to maximize its national gains. This interaction of screen production, place and global economic imperative is clearly expressed by the government department with regard to the screen production sector. The Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs commissioned a report on the ‘audiovisual sector’ in 2016 and describes the sector in language steeped with both economic and employment imperatives. It notes that film and television industries:

Supported nearly 15,000 full-time jobs; 6,700 Irish residents worked as cast or crew in live action film and TV; over 800 Irish residents work in the post-production and VFX sectors; Ireland’s audiovisual sector attracted over €150 million in inward investment in 2016 and was understood to offer capacity for significant further growth.

(Department of Arts, Heritage & the Gaeltacht, 2016)

The state and its agencies actively seek to encourage further growth in cultural industries as part of its economic and employment developmental agenda. Screen Ireland, formerly the Irish Film Board (IFB), is the national development agency for Irish filmmaking (and also encompasses the television and animation industries). Screen Ireland supports writers, directors and production companies across these sectors by providing investment loans for the development, production and distribution of film, television and animation projects. But the agency is also focused on supporting the global growth of Irish screen industries, by participating at major international markets and festivals, by promoting inward investment, and by encouraging the use of Ireland as a location for international production and providing various other supports for international companies filming in Ireland. International film and television productions qualify for Irish tax relief funding under Section 481 (S481) of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997.

But as Massey notes the ‘time-space compression’ and capitalist preoccupation with globalizing expansion does not happen for everyone equally nor in all spheres of activity (1991:25). For many parts of the Irish film and television industries the global aspects of production are not relevant to their experiences of production in Ireland. Much of the work in screen production that occurs in Ireland is aimed not at generating global economic growth but rather is designed to serve national audiences. This is the case for a large section of the independent film sector and also very much the case in terms of broadcasting. Ireland currently has two dual-funded, public service broadcasters, RTÉ and TG4, one commercial broadcaster, TV3, and over 140 small- to medium-sized independent screen-production companies. The independent production sector is reliant on broadcasting for much of its work and revenue, amounting to €40 million in 2016. As its industry representative body, Screen Producers Ireland (SPI, 2016), notes, there is a ‘symbiotic’ relationship between broadcasters and the independent film sector. ‘RTÉ and TG4 act as incubators for Irish producers and production talent. Independently produced programming funded by RTÉ and TG4 are an essential component in the development of the sector’ (SPI, 2016:5). The main focus of this part of the sector sees Irish screen industries not as a potential node in a global capitalist economy, nor even as a significant revenue generator, but rather as a cultural site meeting audience(s) needs. As RTÉ’s strategy document claims:

For over 50 years RTÉ has uniquely and consistently connected journalism, politics, culture and communities, while retaining the trust of the public. RTÉ remains at the center of Irish public life, accessed in any given week by more than 90% of the people living in Ireland.

(RTÉ, 2018)

The definition of workers in the Irish screen production industry that is operationalized throughout the book does not refer only to participants born or resident on the island but also includes people who self-identify as Irish and who work outside of Ireland in the wider UK, European, US or global industry. Data for the book was gathered through semi-structured inter...