We're showing kids a world that is very scantily populated with women and female characters. They should see female characters taking up half the planet, which we do.
Geena DavisRead
It's really important for boys to see that girls take up half of the planet - which we do.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing women's significant presence and contributions in society.
Geena Davis highlights the need for boys to understand that girls are equal participants in the world, constituting half of the population. This awareness is crucial for fostering respect and equality between genders and promoting a more balanced perspective on gender roles.
In practice
In a school presentation on gender equality, one could use this quote to illustrate the significance of female representation.
We're showing kids a world that is very scantily populated with women and female characters. They should see female characters taking up half the planet, which we do.
Having been in some roles that really resonated with women, I became hyper-aware of how women are represented in Hollywood.
We are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space.
When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.
The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life.
Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby.
I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.
Women have much to tell us. Women are capable of seeing things in a different angle. Women can pose questions that we men cannot understand.
Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let's stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices.
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
This idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do.
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