“The ‘Golden Age for Women in TV’ Is Actually a Rerun” is a NYT op-ed by Nell Scovell, the professional writer who created Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. According to Scovell, there are a lot of women writers behind today’s TV shows, but this might not last:
In this sense, gender inequality resembles a bacterial infection two days into a 10-day course of antibiotics. The patient’s temperature may be down, but the Mayo Clinic’s website warns: “It is tempting to stop taking an antibiotic as soon as you feel better. But the full treatment is necessary to kill the disease-causing bacteria. Failure to do so can result in the need to resume treatment later.”
Gender inequality is still in our bloodstream, and when we stop fighting it, the bacteria multiply. We need aggressive treatment that leads to more than incremental progress.
I fantasize about the networks’ making a rule that each show’s writing staff needs to reflect the gender and racial makeup of its audience.
[See this posting on antibiotic duration for why you shouldn’t take medical advice from the NYT Op-Ed section]
I’m wondering why gender is the most important factor. If we are entitled to watch TV shows written by people “like us” aren’t there other important dimensions? Should there be a channel for 52-year-olds that runs TV shows written by 52-year-olds? How about immigrants from Laos? There is plenty of cable bandwidth. Why can’t they have comedies written by fellow immigrants from Laos?
[Readers would be disappointed if I didn’t point out that, to the extent Scovell is concerned that women in the future will not have the opportunity to earn the income of a TV writer, Real World Divorce shows how a woman who has sex with three TV writers will have, via a thoughtfully chosen state’s child support formula (equally applicable to one-night encounters), roughly the same spending power as if she had gone to college and worked as a TV writer.]
It will be interesting to see if the New York Times follows its own scolding. A 60-year-old is a typical American newspaper reader (Pew data; Wikipedia). Is the Times eager to hire and retain 60-year-old writers? (as of a year ago, the Times was doing the opposite, encouraging older workers to take buyout packages (source))
In the current environment, Nell represents a moderate POV. A REAL feminist would say that since men dominated the 1st 60+ years of TV writing, women should dominate the next 60. We see this in academia, where the goal of schools, from Kindergarten to university, is not to have equality but to make the environment as friendly as possible to women and as unfriendly as possible to men.
For example, Congressman Jared Polis recently said this, and was greeted with applause from the audience at his Congressional hearing: “I mean, if there’s 10 people [actually men] that have been accused [of rape] and, under a reasonable likelihood standard, maybe one or two did it, seems better to get rid of all 10 people,” said Polis, a Democrat whose district includes Colorado State University and University of Colorado, as well as Fort Collins. “We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about their transfer to another university, for crying out loud.”
I’m sure the Congressman would feel the same way about losing his seat in Congress based upon an accusation that only had a 10% chance of being true – after all, we’re not talking about depriving him of life or liberty, for crying out loud. All the female US Congresspersons and staff might feel threatened if they were in the presence of a known possible rapist. He could transfer to some other legislative body, such as the Russian Duma or an Afghan loya jirga.
Ironically the quintessential TV show for women, Sex and the City, was written by gay men.
So maybe in a men can write show for men, gay men and write shows for women, and women can complain about the injustice to their husbands who – will agree, if they are smart.
Gender equality seems to be very selective about what positions should be equal
http://i.imgur.com/OJw0zUQ.png