What I do care about is that it's an obstacle to other women entering politics, because they'll say, "Why would I do that? I have plenty of other options." And women with plenty of options are just the women that we want to be in politics and government.
I was admonished ot adopt feminine clothes; I refused, and still refuse. As for other avocations of women, there are plenty of other women to perform them.
We definitely need more women in politics. We don't want women in their late teens or early twenties who are interested in politics to think they would never go into it.
As a CEO, I want to show women that there are no limits to what they can achieve, whether through entrepreneurship, government, science or any path they choose, and there is plenty of room for women at the top.
Women are not only deciding the outcome of elections, they serve as important role models for their daughters and other young women - they hold a key to expanding the way in which women value and experience politics.
Women have a lot of power in private life. There are many men who would say, 'Hey, women already rule my life.' But with women, more is more. The more there are, the more the world gets used to seeing them. We change the culture. We begin to expand options and lead and manage.
Some parents struggle to put food on the table. And plenty of women aren't getting the pay they deserve. While I don't expect the government to solve all these problems, I do want leaders who care about these things and do what they can to help.
It's such a strong drive for women, knowing you were meant to be a mom. We would have gone into debt, done whatever, exhausted all the options, to get there. But a lot of women have to give up on that dream because they can't afford it.
The characters that I want to play are interesting women. I don't care if they're good women or bad women or vulnerable women or women with a lot of faults or women that we dislike intensely who are malicious.
There are all kinds of ways in which women, together, change the world. And I don't mean that in a cheesy way. I'm not somebody who believes all women should support each other. I believe very strongly in women critiquing each other, just not critiquing each other more intensely because they're women.
Because of the men in charge of this system, they've created this caste system for women that gives some of the women in higher places a false sense of authority. You have women who are able to just look at other women and from the color of the clothes they are wearing and they can know how they're supposed to interact with each other. It's a really horrible thing but genius in a way to pit them against each other because once you are, there is no community anymore. There is just people trying to keep each other down.
Women's sport helps break down a lot of barriers for women in other areas, whether in religion or politics.
People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.
For me, coming from the women's movement, politics is not just about parties and parliament. There is politics in our private space and in gender relations as well. Wherever there's power, there's politics.
Plenty of women say, "I'm just going to make myself into a sex object." But they often can't stay afloat doing that. They can't maintain their sanity. Some women can, but many cannot. They think they can, but self-objectification is really dangerous.
The feminist movement is not about success for women. It is about treating women as victims and about telling women that you can't succeed because society is unfair to you, and I think that's a very unfortunate idea to put in the minds of young women because I believe women can do whatever they want.
The inspiration for this movie [Something New] was this Newsweek article that came out a couple of years ago that talks about 42.4 percent of black women in America aren't married. Black women are shooting up the corporate ladder way faster than our black male counterparts. And (black men) are either dating outside their race, in jail or dying. And so if you want to have a family, you want to be married, you have to look at other options.