17% of cardiac surgeons are women, 17% of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice?
…We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17% women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33% women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.
Women and Hollywood published this story on May 16th in which actor/producer Salma Hayek “dropped epic truth bombs for about an hour” about Hollywood’s gender problem:
“The only two industries where women make more money than men is fashion and pornography and in those we are treated as sexual objects. This is an ignorant way of looking at who we are. We don’t want to watch things that promote us as sexual objects.” — Salma Hayek
“We can’t take the risk of you opening your mouth and people thinking of their maids. You could have been a big star but you were born in the wrong country.” — Salma Hayek
“Movies are in trouble because [women] don’t want to see their movies. We lost the beautiful love for the ritual of going to the movies because we now watch content on tv because they abandoned us. They don’t know what we want.” — Salma Hayek
The article goes on to say that, “She told the story about how a male director fought to cast her and then gave up when the studio kept saying no. He sent her a note saying he was ashamed and we should have walked away but he needed the movie. The studio wouldn’t hire her because they couldn’t imagine ‘a Mexican in space.’”
