Much of the conversation this week has stemmed from comments made by Recording Academy president Neil Portnow, who was asked about why the 2018 Grammys were so conspicuously male. His reply—now infamous—included a sentence about how women need to “step up.” Fans and musicians alike responded uproariously, including a declarative handwritten letter from Pink, who proclaimed, “Women in music don’t need to ‘step up,’ women have been stepping up since the beginning of time,” and—as of Friday—several female music executives are calling for Portnow’s resignation.
Facing backlash, Portnow since attempted to walk back the statement, insisting that his words were used out of context, and did damage control by announcing Thursday that the academy would put together an independent task force, designed to review biases and barriers that keep women from advancing in the industry.
All well and good, but let’s not forget that the problem with telling women to “step up,” which he addresses in his second statement, is that it completely erases the obstacles women in music—and in the work force—have to overcome on a daily basis. Issues like lower pay, lack of opportunity, sexism and—as we’ve come to understand more recently—the pervasive problem of sexual harassment. The idea that Portnow purveyed isn’t new. Successful white men across all industries are often so mired in privilege that they often peddle this false equivalence: Women are actually being given fair opportunities, but they’re not doing enough to claim them.
Women in power, including politicians like Kirsten Gillibrand and Hillary Clinton, know this narrative well. “The larger question about Gillibrand, though, is whether she is too transparently opportunistic to be a viable candidate,” The Daily Beast’s Ciro Scotti wrote in a take-down piece about the senator. After urging colleagues to demand Al Franken, accused of sexual misconduct, resign, Gillibrand was met with gendered criticism reminiscent of Clinton’s 2016 campaign. In the piece, titled “The Trouble With Kirsten Gillibrand,” Scotti suggests that the senator led the charge against sexual harassment as part of her “relentless positioning for a possible presidential run in 2020.”
We should step up to the plate and take what’s ours, but when we do, it bothers you.
When women are finally afforded high-ranking positions, having fought tooth and nail to get there, they’re met with either sexist narratives like Portnow’s insistence on “stepping up,” or misogynistic tirades that they’re actually trying too hard. We should step up to the plate and take what’s ours, but when we do, it bothers you.
Like during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. She “stepped up” as an attempt to become the first female president of the United States, and men criticized her for being “unlikeable” and “ruthless.” Simultaneously, the women who fought to get Hillary elected—the women who also were “stepping up”—were labeled as voting with their vaginas.
And unfortunately, sexism doubles down on women of color. Senator Kamala Harris was criticized for not being “courteous” in a Senate Intelligence Hearing—a gendered condemnation her male counterparts would never receive. She’s also been censured by white women, including Senator Diane Feinstein, who insinuated that Harris was too inexperienced for a presidential run—as if that mattered for our current president—or our last one.
The most astounding part about the challenges women face in the workplace, which seem so clear and unmistakable, is that many men, especially ones like Portnow, who’ve held power for a long time, don’t even recognize it—or have decided to turn a blind eye. That’s when the vitriolic chauvinism seeps through the cracks. In 2014 an audience member at a Tribeca Innovation Week panel asked panelist Aaron Sorkin about the lack of female protagonists in film. Sorkin, the decorated writer behind The West Wing, The Newsroom, and more recently, the Jessica Chastain vehicle Molly’s Game, agreed that there was a disparity between who was buying movie tickets—women—and who was up onscreen. He responded, “These decisions aren’t made entirely by men. There are roughly as many women who can green-light a film in Hollywood as there are men,” naming Amy Pascal of Sony and Stacy Snider at Dreamworks as examples. This is a farce—a 2017 study showed that women make up just 31 percent of film executives, and 18 percent of the 250 top grossing films of the year included female directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers—a statistic that has barely budged in 20 years.
Women have always been “stepping up.” The problem is that we often see no return.
Yet, Sorkin answered the audience member’s question by insisting that female-led scripts just aren’t out there—they don’t exist, and if they do, they’re not very good. “I’ve been reading a lot recently about how a female-driven movie like, say, Bridesmaids is looked at as a fluke.” He continued, “That’s a premise that suggests that studio executives have piles of scripts as good as Bridesmaids on their desks. They don’t…. I promise you nothing but capitalism drives decision-making in Hollywood.” Again, a farce.
Sorkin went on to write and direct his first female-led narrative, Molly’s Game, in 2017—because if women wouldn’t step up to write female characters, who better to do the job than a man? Actually, the top three grossing movies of 2017 were female-led films (The Last Jedi, Beauty and the Beast, and Wonder Woman), but they were all written by male screenwriters. Both The Last Jedi and Wonder Woman were hailed for their propulsive feminist narratives, so why weren’t women given the opportunity to tell such stories? It’s insulting. If that doesn’t prove a disparity in job accessibility, I’m not sure what will.
While men like Sorkin or Scotti are peddling sexist rhetoric, their words weren’t necessarily overt. The problem is that this sort of bombast engenders more dangerous opinions about women in the workplace. Take James Damore for example, the scandalized ex–Google employee who wrote a manifesto on working women, proclaiming that Silicon Valley doesn’t have a gender disparity problem but rather women are just too “neurotic” to achieve superior positions. Damore claimed “personality differences” were the reason that women are underrepresented in tech, not lack of opportunity. This is obviously severely untrue, extremely insulting, and a dismal reflection of old-school views of gender roles.
Women cannot be elevated if the men who hold the keys to the gates won’t open them.
But like Pink wrote, women have always been “stepping up.” The problem is that we often see no return. Men are still holding the topmost positions of power in our country across most industries, and obviously in politics, and they’re not sharing a piece of the pie—and Hollywood is the perfect example. This year zero female directors were nominated in the direction category at the Golden Globes. Many feel that Dee Rees and Greta Gerwig were snubbed, considering Gerwig’s Lady Bird won the prize for Best Musical or Comedy Motion Picture, and Mudbound was nominated for four Oscars.
At the Grammys, zero women were nominated for Record of the Year. In the Best Pop Solo Performance Category, four women were nominated alongside Ed Sheeran, but Sheeran took the trophy. Alessia Cara was literally the only woman awarded a solo Grammy this year. Even when we do the work—great work, work that returns profit—we’re being pushed out, silenced, snubbed. Women cannot be elevated if the men who hold the keys to the gates won’t open them.
The thing about privilege is: If you have it, it can be hard to look past it—but we must. We must push forward and elevate the voices of women, especially women of color, in the workplace. Some men, like Sorkin or Portnow, have been so steeped in their own straight, white, male privilege that they literally can’t even imagine what it’s like to face systemic challenges. The idea that women should “step up” or “try harder” or “run more” is silly—we’ve been doing that for years, you just won’t permit us to succeed. We “step up” every damn day, but the road to equality is littered with hurdles—and it’s time men share the responsibility of knocking those hurdles down.
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