There's so many gatekeepers to getting in front of showrunners or executives. If we pull those middlemen out, and we get women in rooms with the executives, the people hiring, it seems to break down barriers. Because they can no longer say, 'There just aren't any women to hire,' when you're surrounded by fifty of them.
What you don't want is just to say, 'All showrunners need to be half women and half men,' because then, for men and women, you could get inexperienced people doing those jobs, failing, and then not getting the opportunity to do them again.
We get the best people we can get and it turns out a lot of them are women. I've said this before If you hire people solely on their merit you wind up hiring a lot of women. I wonder how many other shows even come close to our numbers.
Women can break down barriers to opportunity, and men, many of them reluctantly, have learned to relate to women as their equals in thought and action. But except for an eccentric few, women do not want to become warriors.
At this moment in history, millions of 'working dads' are desiring to do what they do not feel they have the right to do: be more devoted as a dad, less devoted as a worker. This feeling is far more ubiquitous among men executives than women executives in many areas of the world because, for instance, Asia-Pacific women executives today are more than six times as likely to not have children than men executives are. The Asia-Pacific executive man is about six times as likely to be a working dad as an executive woman is to be a working mom.
Every time a journalist will say: "Can women be funny? Can women be pilots? Can women be scientists?" It's less of a question and more of a statement after a while that makes you believe that maybe we can't. I think that's dangerous. I was really happy that I didn't have those barriers, but now I recognize the barriers of many other people.
I certainly hope that we will get more women in power, when it comes to executives and producers and directors, because the problem is not a shortage of females who are qualified to do the job. It's just that women are not favoured or chosen.
We also look at farming. Are we making sure that we're getting the latest seeds out to women so they can get a bigger yield off of their farms? A new type of seed that gets out to a man, let's say, that's drought resistant - because, of course, the rains are changing in Africa with climate change - if you don't put it in the hands of a woman, she won't necessarily get it. We look at breaking down all those barriers.
These pharmaceutical company executives are dope dealers and they should be treated worse, and more roughly than dope dealers. When you're talking about millionaire and billionaire executives at pharmaceutical companies, these are people with something to lose if threatened with jail. Frog-march them out of their door in suburbia, handcuffed and surrounded by DEA officers, with their children and neighbours watching.
My attitude about Hollywood is that I wouldn't walk across the street to pull one of those executives out of the snow if he was bleeding to death. Not unless I was paid for it. None of them ever did me any favors.
Lita was, quite frankly, a trailblazer. She was the first woman to break down barriers by being different from other women in WWE. She didn't just break them down: she flew over them, put them through tables, and downright destroyed them.
Any board executive can forget just how many people helped them get where they are. Those women who have got to the top need actively to ensure there is a pipeline of younger women, whether by networking or mentoring, who in turn are encouraging those below them.
Accountability is a two way street. We can't just make it easier for us to fire people; we must make it easier for us to hire people. It takes VA an average of 240 days to complete the hiring process for executives joining VA from outside government. We are losing talented people because it simply takes too long.
In our society, the women who break down barriers are those who ignore limits.
The women executives in the film industry have the power to say, 'No,' but few of them have the power to say, 'Yes.'
Women's sport helps break down a lot of barriers for women in other areas, whether in religion or politics.
I'm not trying to be anyone. You know why other executives always hire phonies? Because they're phonies. They hire phonies because they like phonies. They're comfortable with them.