You can’t be what you can’t see.
Marian Wright Edelman
“If they see it, they can be it
Geena Davis, March 19, 2015 at Mount St. Mary’s University.
To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.
Patricia Arquette, acceptance speech for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (2015).
All three women converged in aspirations that the time has come for women to lead. For far too long, we have been relegated to the background, in support of, and behind men in many organizations.
The time is now for women to be in parity with men. For far too long we have toiled and worked hard, and contributed to growing businesses, non-profits, foundations, and even government institutions, including tending to a home and children, while for every dollar that the man gets paid, a fraction of 84 cents goes to a woman.
The Report on the Status of Women and Girls, unveiled before a crowd of 1,000 at Skirball Museum, valued lost wages and unrealized gains at $450 billion.
Close to half a trillion dollars that women are not paid, even as they work hard and perform, in the workplace.
The Los Angeles Times’ Feb. 22, 2015 business front page headlined “Not a woman’s place: Many are leaving tech, citing a hostile environment.”
It is a world where women are made to prove themselves over and over again, “The continuous pattern of all these people treating me like I didn’t know what was going on, or excluding me from conversations and not trusting my assertions, all these things added up and it felt like there was an undercurrent of sexism,“ according to Tracy Chou, 27, a Pinterest engineer.
It is a world where Code.org claims that computing jobs will more than double to 1.2 million in 2020. So in the high tech world of Facebook, Instagram, Yahoo, Google, Snapchat, Pinterest and more, the LA Times reports that men outnumber women by 4 to 1.
What can be done towards gender parity and women empowerment?
In California, the state legislature has the fewest number of women since 1998 and ranks 17th in women’s representations in state legislatures (The Report on Status of Women and Girls by Mount St. Mary’s University, March 19, 2015).
In the 2014 election, the report found that women won 5 out of 20 Senate and 19 out of 80 Assembly races.
In California’s 58 counties, women represent just about 255 of all county board supervisors and 28 percent of the all city council seats in the state’s 482 cities.
When I worked at a state public health agency, I was the only female of color out of three regional administrators, two of whom were white males. That was in 1992.
Since Mayor Eric Garcetti was elected to serve LA in 2013, 54 percent of his appointees to boards and commissions have been women. That mayoral action transformed gender inequality into making LA a model city where gender parity exists in executive positions.
No longer the media-profiled city of gangbangers and drive-by shootings, Los Angeles City is coming into a healthy bloom, symbolized by the revitalized Echo Park, where lotuses are again alive and will be blooming in the summer.
We just wish that bloom and new life is reflected in all areas of the city, not so much in new buildings, but in neighborhoods with less trash, more parks, and better-paved sidewalks and streets.
LA’s First Lady, Amy Elaine Wakeland, reported that 3 out of 4 deputies to the mayor are women, and that of the 12 department general managers, six are women. The first lady asserts that if inequality of women’s status is not being monitored, then the problem of women’s inequality is not being addressed.
Yet, she is the first to admit that the two critical and significant departments, fire and police, have yet to address gender parity in their hiring practices.
Perhaps that lack of gender parity is also contributing to the surge of $18 million in settlements, from lawsuits filed by LAPD officers against the department.
The LA Times reported that from 2005 to 2010, officers sued the department more than 250 times over workplace issues, exposing crude behavior and retaliatory mindsets of supervisors.
Just recently, the LA Times reported a captain being retired from his position when sexual harassment allegations came up during his watch. When I read that he was allowed to retire on a five-figure pension, one must ask — was he rewarded with early retirement for his rogue, demeaning behaviors? No wonder men keep doing it, because they lose nothing of value.
To change that culture in the LAPD will require a mindset change where officers at the top are trained to provide good leadership practices, contributing to a professional workplace culture and a consciousness of sexual harassment prevention.
Back to the film industry: Two easy ways to address sexism in the film industry, according to Geena Davis, is first, when crowds are cast, 50 percent go to women and before casting is done for the actors, consider half of the roles written to be for women and change the character names to that of women.
By doing so, you will find women doing non-traditional roles in film and television and we can start seeing women in positions of visibility, echoing what she said, “If they see it, they can be it.”
Recall the television program where Geena Davis played Commander-in-Chief Mackenzie Allen, created by Rod Lurie? That show ranked #1 in ratings in 2005, until its contender, “American Idol” outranked it. Had the network, ABC, supported it beyond its first season of 18 episodes, who knows how far we would have been prepared to watch and to visualize a woman president in the White House?
Consider for example CBS’ “Madam Secretary” and we now expect foreign policy decisions can be done by a woman and more so, we can expect her to qualify as a future president.
Have you seen Netflix’s “The Bodyguard” where the secretary of state is cast as a woman, though still portrayed as a devious, manipulative, ambitious one until she is assassinated? Not a good scenario for a woman in a high position of power — to be a victim of a murderous coup by males who conspire to have her position — good thing that is fiction!
Davis spoke of how in the 129 top-grossing films in 2006 -2011, the ratio of females to males is 2:5.
“California is one of the largest producers of film,” according to the report, yet women in the film industry occupy fewer than 20 percent of the critical behind-the-scenes occupations, serving primarily as producers.
Moving forward to gender parity and empowerment
In California, 61 percent of the female population are women of color: Latinos, Asians, African Americans, who can determine the outcome of its elections, if all of these women of color voted.
In 2018, I am optimistic as I see women candidates running in every level of public position, which we hope after the midterm elections in November would create a tsunami of potential substantive change for America.
“Latinas make up the state’s youngest and second-largest ethnic group under the age of 25,” according to “The Report on the Status of Women and Girls in California” in 2015.
Which means, elections upon elections, if Latina women under age 25 registered, voted and informed themselves to vote as a group, Latina women might determine the outcome of elections in California.
For the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the candidate who communicated her vision persuasively to these Latina women, and addressed their concerns towards reunification of their families through immigration reform, did not become the next White House resident.
Yet, even if the demographics changed to reflect more of these young Latinas, their voting rights have been restricted in 22 states.
American Prospect reported “of the 22 states with new restrictions, 18 passed them through Republican-controlled bodies. After Republicans took over state houses and governorships in 2010, voting restrictions typically followed party lines.”
But, hope is always alive. As young women are now earning 170,000 more bachelor’s degrees each year than men, according to the Millennial Legacy’s website, “today, women represent roughly half of the nation’s law and medical students and 55 percent of the nation’s professionals overall.”
Education will empower these women to design their own lives and to take charge of their communities and later, even leading their own city council districts and legislative assembly positions, Senate races, business establishments, foundations and non-profit leadership positions.
Carlos Bulosan wrote, “…history has determined our lives, and we must…work hard for what we believe to be the right thing…life is something we borrow and must give back richer when the time comes.”
In time, and hopefully in our lifetimes, we can witness not just gender parity in the city of LA’s executive part of the municipal government, but also in the LAPD, in the LAFD, and see that realized as well in California, in Washington, DC and throughout the U.S.
If Iceland, Finland, Philippines, Belgium, Germany and United Kingdom have all been led by women presidents, we too can elect a woman to be U.S. president, a woman to lead us from the Oval Office and to be our Commander-in-Chief.
As Amy Wakeland said, “Talent is universally distributed, but opportunities are not.”
Published on Asian Journal