The medical profession used to be totally male-dominated. That didn’t stop women from becoming doctors in droves despite all the discrimination and outright bullying they faced. Now women dominate many of the medical specialities.
I think this is different. I think becoming a film director is simply not a viable career path for 99% of all people who attempt it, regardless of gender. This is very much distinct from both acting and music as careers (there are countless moderately successful small-time actors and musicians but almost no small-time film directors).
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 week ago
You have an awfully low opinion of women’s agency.
Regarding STEM: Countries with higher gender equality have lower rates of women in STEM. One factor there is that STEM pays well so in less equal societies getting into it gets you independence and security that is not necessary in more equal ones.
Regarding CS in particular, it was found that the type of examples in intro courses has a lot of influence, e.g. you can explain Dijkstra’s algorithm by talking about finding the shortest path a message might take between two people who know each other only via chains of acquaintances, or by having a robot find a path through a maze. Once people are into the field it doesn’t matter any more as they recognise examples as that, mere examples of a more general thing, but the intro classes should address preferences of different populations equally and we don’t have to get into why those preferences exist that’s irrelevant. Just do it.
hasnt_seen_goonies@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This has very little to do with my opinion of women’s agency and has more to do with my opinion on human agency in general. I have known many women in my stem field who are better than me at my job, and I know many that have faced discrimination/hostile work places.
I mention the Scully effect (see also the uhura effect) because as humans, we aren’t immune from propaganda, and when media companies accidentally or purposefully make a character that inspired people, it seems weird to not acknowledge it?
The number of big Hollywood directors is small, so general workplace trends might not be as noticable, but I still think that the typical director in media is depicted as male. I think that would have a noticable effect if you could find two populations who had experienced different depictions in media, and polled them about dream jobs.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Is there a particular narrative floating around “women can’t do movies”? In the present, I mean? There have been plenty of “women can’t be soldiers” narratives in Uhura’s time, also (in the US) “black women can if anything only be maids in movies”, of course that opens a door.
To me, “women can’t do movies” makes about as much sense as “women can’t write books”. Ask even a paleoconservative and I doubt either would make sense to them. There has to be a narrative that needs to be broken for a narrative-breaking role model to have an effect, especially as “you can do anything, girl” is also a narrative.
Also, rant: Why is it that female role models got a downgrade. I’m talking about the original Mulan “be smart about things and play to your strengths and you can achieve the barely imaginable” vs. remake Mulan “you have literal magic powers that’s why you’re better than everyone at everything” type of thing.
…just looked at who wrote/directed either and let me just say that according to this limited sample, it is infinitely better to have men write and direct inspirational movies for girls than let women do it. Just for the record I don’t doubt that women can make good movies, those just clearly can’t, and I hated the remake before I just looked up who made it.
What’s more important: That the movie inspires a billion young girls or that the behind the scenes inspires the 10k who bother to watch it?