Working Towards Gender Equality In Business And Entertainment

I’m a member of the San Francisco chapter of Women In Animation. A few days ago Pixar hosted their member’s meeting with exciting guest speaker, Janet Crawford. Ms Crawford is the founder of Cascadence, a leadership development firm for Fortune 500 and high potential technology start-ups that “aligns business and biology for organizational excellence.” Her talk, The Surprising Neuroscience of Gender Inequality, was given to help open our eyes to gender bias in the media and present ways we, as artists, could help combat the issue.

I was particularly interested in the subject because, as a women starting my own business in the entertainment and specifically animation industry, I will obviously be in a leadership position. That in and of itself is a fairly daunting prospect regardless of the disheartening statistics showing how few women hold leadership positions in the industry. Given that, my hope is to gain more understanding of this issue so I can navigate the coming waters and help to shift the paradigm towards more equality.

The good news, accord ing to neuroscience, is that gender inequality is not the outcome of any devious plot on the part of men or the business world - it is happening quite unconsciously and both genders perpetuate it due to our hard wiring. In the GE Idea Lab article, Where Are The Women In Leadership, Crawford states:

The human brain is a highly sophisticated pattern recognition machine. We are built to replicate the culture in which we are immersed and we unconsciously map the environment around us. Whatever we are accustomed to seeing becomes what we recognize as normal. We look at a boardroom filled with men and nothing stands out as missing – it fits our unconscious pattern recognition.

This unconscious patterning then creates templates that guide our choices and thus create an implicit bias “even among those who consciously wish to promote women.” This bias is then responsible for perpetuating the images we see in the media, namely far more images of men in leadership roles than women, and then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

How do we shift this paradigm? Well, as Crawford would say:

There is no one answer, but four things are imperative:

• Raise awareness of implicit bias and create programs to combat it

• Change the conversation. This is a business issue, not a just a women’s issue.

• Depolarize the conversation and enroll men in the movement to gender equity, and

• Create workplaces that recognize and reward both feminine and masculine leadership styles

Fortunately, my business model has been planned to take these actions into account and what’s more exciting is that the main character in the animated series we’re developing is a strong female lead who we’ve already had batting and breaking down these barriers by nature of the very imperatives listed. We are in the conversation and doing something about it!

Resources:

About :: Cascadance. (n.d.). Retrieved August 9, 2014, from http://www.cascadance.com/about/ Crawford, J. (2014, February 19). Where are the Women in Leadership? - GE Ideas Lab. Retrieved August 9, 2014, from http://www.ideaslaboratory.com/post/93343665753/where-are-the-women-in-leadership