Yesterday I wrote a an article about why it is that women are not fulfilling leadership roles. From personal experience I shared that I just don’t feel like it, and wondered if THAT was the real reason the executive boards don’t represent the real world: 50% of the population are women, so why aren’t 50% of the leadership roles filled by women?
Many attribute the phenomenon to glass ceiling, labyrinth and sexism theories. The question was: Millennial women of the world, why aren’t we filling those roles? Have you been put down by men and society? Or do you just not want the job?
The response was shocking. I did not immediately get responses from working women answering that question; instead, I got comments basically saying I was undermining the sexism that women suffer through all over the world. Someone even said that my article couldn’t have been written by a woman at all. I kept wondering why people weren’t answering the right question? Why were they focusing on the sexism aspect? (which, by the way, had nothing to do with the question of whether Millennial women want the leadership role or not). The discussion got out of focus and the debate steered to the most dramatic and far-fetched assumption: this is a sexist article and the author is promoting that women want to stay at home and have babies! The horror!!! Not the case, not the point, and the debate I meant to start never actually took place. To be fair, I did get one person who contributed to the discussion saying that feminism progress is about having the CHOICE to do what we want, as opposed to being measured in % of women occupying seats in boardrooms. That was a great contribution, and I wish I had had more comments like that.
A fellow columnist is going through this same issue right now. Ramin Setoodeh wrote an article called “Straight Jacket” on Newsweek about why there aren’t more gay actors playing straight roles. His argument/opinion was that they were not believable. I personally don’t know why there aren’t more gay actors playing leading roles, but would be really interested in hearing people’s perspectives on it. What do gay actors think about that? What does the population as a whole feel when they see openly gay actors playing heterosexual romantic interests? I guess we will never know, because the media simply put a homophobic label on the article, and on Ramin himself, who is actually gay, and decided to focus on that drama instead.
People of the world: there are MANY interesting topics we could be discussing. If we continue to focus on the exaggerated notion that everyone must be racist, homophobic, sexist or not politically correct in order to bring them up, we will never get to the bottom of certain topics, such as what are the current job trends for women? What is the trend on their career choices? How do you think gay actors are fairing? Are they being pigeonholed? What do they themselves think about the roles they play? Do they think they are believable as straight love interests? I guess those questions are too hard to concentrate on while we have our fingers ready to point.
You can read Ramin’s rebuttal here.
ina
Comments
9 responses to “Misunderstood: America Loves Drama”