Friday, September 14, 2007
What’s In It For Me?
Why do the media and the publishing industry persistently dwell on the negative message, especially when it comes to women in leadership?
Donna E. Shalala, former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President Clinton asks about the choices we make ourselves:
“We need to ask ourselves -— when given the choice and the power to influence girls’ lives, did we choose to have a positive effect or a negative effect or no effect at all? When a girl is looking in the mirror of popular culture today, what will she see? Will she know that her health and future are more important than her image? That the size of her ambition is more important than the size of her clothes? That the dreams she creates for herself are more important than those created for her by others?”
That was the message from a conference held 7 years ago and reported in Reflections on Girls in the Media, from Children Now's Fourth Annual Children & the Media Conference, August 1997, co-hosted with the UCLA Center for Communication Policy and Stanford University.
Two questions were at the heart of the conference:
1. How are females portrayed in today’s media?
2. Do media messages influence our nation’s girls?
Reflections on Girls in the Media
We have not made very much progress since then.
Today, still, Media Matters (www.mediamatters.org) delights in shaking their sabers about Chris Matthews making stupid sexist comments regarding the looks of a woman news commentator. Women journalists persist in rehashing the same old message about all the many and different ways women can fail: hitting glass ceilings, concrete ceilings, marble ceilings, vaulted or mosaic ceilings. Don’t you just feel physically contorted by their very choice of words?
What is in it for them? What is their “take away?” What is their motivation for spewing the negatives? What does it benefit them to constantly advocate that women are marginalized, desperate and hopeless? If they make women sound so miserable, is it just to ensure that women will be pitied, favored, pampered, babied, and treated like the princesses they wish they were?
Who today really believes that the current opportunities for women to achieve leadership roles are LESS than they’ve ever been in the past? Who believes that discrimination, bias or prejudice against women is MORE today than in the past?
The message matters. The picture that we see and read in our public media is the message we take to heart.
1. If the market is divided into a small segment vs. a large segment, then the media wants to market to the larger sector of the two. The small share of women on boards means that the larger market is the number of women who are NOT on boards. We have a choice. We could make those women feel bad and discriminated against or we could inspire and encourage them to strive, to excel and to succeed. It’s easier to make women feel miserable.
2. If Party A has something that Party B does not have, then blame Party A for not sharing. It’s not Party B’s fault for failing to excel. It’s the fault of the evil corporations and executive males for not inviting more women onto their corporate boards.
3. Those in positions of authority should provide special favors or incentives to those who have not developed or acquired the credentials or capabilities for leadership. Or provide bribes to those who don’t want to participate in the business marketplace or full-time work.
4. “We all” have a stake in this because “it takes a village” to solve problems that deal with women, but anybody else can solve his own problems all by himself.
5. Throw out numbers that shock and awe, so you can be confident in using the word “only” to demonstrate suffering, invoke guilt and demonstrate failed expectations for women “only.”
For example, “only 15%” of corporate board seats might be occupied by women in 2006. Be sure not to cite any statistics that would put that data point into historical perspective.
How much of this progress has occurred in recent years?
How have boards and governance gone through tectonic change in the brief five years since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in 2002?
How have boards themselves changed: reducing their overall size, adding more women while letting more men go?
How is it today that fewer women hold multiple corporate board seats and that more companies than ever before have placed at least one women director?
How are corporations reaching deeper into their available top tier of executive ranks to find competent women and diversity candidates?
How is it that so many more women, today more than ever before, are qualified by their education and their experience?
Is the share of women directors comparable to that of women in leadership in other parts of the economy?
Women on the Supreme Court (11%), in the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives (16%), deans of law schools (15%), U.S. Supreme Court law clerks (19%), law partners (17%), Fortune 500 firm general counsel (17%) or Fortune 1000 firm general counsel (16%).
It's hard work dealing with these tough questions. What's in it for the media? Maybe it's a simple as taking the easy way out.
Donna E. Shalala, former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President Clinton asks about the choices we make ourselves:
“We need to ask ourselves -— when given the choice and the power to influence girls’ lives, did we choose to have a positive effect or a negative effect or no effect at all? When a girl is looking in the mirror of popular culture today, what will she see? Will she know that her health and future are more important than her image? That the size of her ambition is more important than the size of her clothes? That the dreams she creates for herself are more important than those created for her by others?”
That was the message from a conference held 7 years ago and reported in Reflections on Girls in the Media, from Children Now's Fourth Annual Children & the Media Conference, August 1997, co-hosted with the UCLA Center for Communication Policy and Stanford University.
Two questions were at the heart of the conference:
1. How are females portrayed in today’s media?
2. Do media messages influence our nation’s girls?
Reflections on Girls in the Media
We have not made very much progress since then.
Today, still, Media Matters (www.mediamatters.org) delights in shaking their sabers about Chris Matthews making stupid sexist comments regarding the looks of a woman news commentator. Women journalists persist in rehashing the same old message about all the many and different ways women can fail: hitting glass ceilings, concrete ceilings, marble ceilings, vaulted or mosaic ceilings. Don’t you just feel physically contorted by their very choice of words?
What is in it for them? What is their “take away?” What is their motivation for spewing the negatives? What does it benefit them to constantly advocate that women are marginalized, desperate and hopeless? If they make women sound so miserable, is it just to ensure that women will be pitied, favored, pampered, babied, and treated like the princesses they wish they were?
Who today really believes that the current opportunities for women to achieve leadership roles are LESS than they’ve ever been in the past? Who believes that discrimination, bias or prejudice against women is MORE today than in the past?
The message matters. The picture that we see and read in our public media is the message we take to heart.
1. If the market is divided into a small segment vs. a large segment, then the media wants to market to the larger sector of the two. The small share of women on boards means that the larger market is the number of women who are NOT on boards. We have a choice. We could make those women feel bad and discriminated against or we could inspire and encourage them to strive, to excel and to succeed. It’s easier to make women feel miserable.
2. If Party A has something that Party B does not have, then blame Party A for not sharing. It’s not Party B’s fault for failing to excel. It’s the fault of the evil corporations and executive males for not inviting more women onto their corporate boards.
3. Those in positions of authority should provide special favors or incentives to those who have not developed or acquired the credentials or capabilities for leadership. Or provide bribes to those who don’t want to participate in the business marketplace or full-time work.
4. “We all” have a stake in this because “it takes a village” to solve problems that deal with women, but anybody else can solve his own problems all by himself.
5. Throw out numbers that shock and awe, so you can be confident in using the word “only” to demonstrate suffering, invoke guilt and demonstrate failed expectations for women “only.”
For example, “only 15%” of corporate board seats might be occupied by women in 2006. Be sure not to cite any statistics that would put that data point into historical perspective.
Women on the Supreme Court (11%), in the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives (16%), deans of law schools (15%), U.S. Supreme Court law clerks (19%), law partners (17%), Fortune 500 firm general counsel (17%) or Fortune 1000 firm general counsel (16%).
It's hard work dealing with these tough questions. What's in it for the media? Maybe it's a simple as taking the easy way out.
# posted by ChampionBoards.com @ 3:58 PM 
