Representation, inclusivity, and the
end of white, male media
The Toronto International Film Festival did not, at first glance, seem like the setting for an industry-shaking feminist rally — or at least not one organized by TIFF itself. Everywhere I looked, the festival grounds brimmed with corporate-sponsored booths. At one outdoor feature, women in matching red berets and blue peacoats ushered festival-goers in front of an Eiffel Tower replica sponsored by Air France. At another, people snaked around a Pure Leaf tea booth, waiting either for samples or for a chance to take a selfie on a white wooden swing nestled inside an explosion of flowers, or, who knows, probably both. L’Oréal gave makeovers while also “celebrating iconic women in film.” Most of the barricades marking the TIFF road closures were 7-Up branded. Even as I got closer to the rally site — which I, amusingly, had RSVP-ed for, in a show of organized dissent — I couldn’t shake the sanitized feel. TIFF volunteers handed out black T-shirts branded #ShareHerJourney and fistfuls of colourful buttons. That the artificial grass didn’t move at all as the wind gusted only added to the surreal feeling. It also didn’t help that there was only one person in the giant crowd holding a protest sign: “Men of Quality Don’t Fear Equality.”
Any fear I had about the rally being bland or corporatized, like some of the other features of the festival, however, disappeared when the women started talking. Because they were inspiring and they were furious.
It was 2018, nearly one year after the #MeToo movement went viral, and the rally was meant to push for more women in film. But now that these women finally had a stage, they were ready to talk about so much more — including why the vision for diversity in film could not be limited to a white feminist’s utopia. One speaker was Amma Asante, an actor and director whose fourth film was premiering at the festival that year. “Now if there’s anybody here who is going to sigh at this point, ‘Oh, why does she have to bring race into a conversation about all women?’” she began, acknowledging the tension too often present when a woman of colour speaks about race, and she went on to suggest that anyone sighing should consider how it felt to have society constantly question and dismiss the obstacles of inequality that faced them as women. “Remember how that feels. If we are going to be concerned with equality for women in film, then the very poignant issues for women of colour in film must enter the equation in a hugely significant way.”
She was forced to pause, unable to speak over the burst of clapping and cheering, the thunderous woooos rising to meet the air. She would be remiss, she added, if she did not use the platform she had that day to confront the ways in which misogyny and sexism are magnified once race becomes part of the equation — if she did not use her time now to speak for others who were just like her. Or, rather, others who wanted to be like her but were never able to break through in an industry that didn’t want to see them. The last time she looked, she said, Black women directors made up not even one percent of their industry. And because those numbers are so minuscule, she added, the motivation to look into their experiences, triumphs, and difficulties has been equally small. Those numbers would never get bigger until advocates and researchers had the courage to dig into Black women’s experiences and the problems they face both entering the industry and then navigating it. “We are here,” said Asante, “yet we are erased when analysis of the industry absorbs us into pages that look purely at race or purely at gender.”
She knew first-hand, she told the rapt crowd, that the unique problems Black women directors face do not evaporate after one film. Asante’s fourth film, Where Hands Touch, is the film she wanted to make second. Instead, she was told repeatedly that the film was “too big.” Its story is set during the Second World War, in 1944 Berlin, and Asante was often implicitly, if not explicitly, reminded that such time periods and genres are usually the domain of white, male directors. So, she said, we must also ask: What kind of movies does a Black woman get to make? How does her access to film’s many genres differ from that of other filmmakers? How are those prospects additionally limited, even in the context of the sparse opportunities for all women? What is a Black woman’s journey through development, production, and distribution, and how does it differ from that of her white counterparts? We must ask these questions and more, relentlessly, until there are answers, she insisted. Until it isn’t so truly, devastatingly rare to see women like Asante leading in the film industry.
She did stay in the industry, she added, because both women and men mentored her and gave her opportunities she might not otherwise have had. As she put it, these people in power “allowed their positions to work for me rather than against.” They saw her talent, not their own assumptions. “In short,” she said, “they saw me.” The crowd roared again, cheers and claps domino-ing into each other. They saw her, too. Invisible turned visible. But, she added. But. Having used her platform that day to speak for Black women filmmakers, having used it to galvanize a crowd of hundreds, she hoped that, ultimately, she’d be able to talk about something else. Something she hardly ever got to speak about: her work. Speaking out about inequality had been a necessity; it wasn’t her calling.
“So what I am saying is, oh, to live in a world where any Black woman creative, any woman creative and artist, did not have to stand on a platform in 2018 and speak about why power-sharing and equality is essential, unless we choose to do so through and within our storytelling,” she thundered. “Oh, to have the privilege that those who do not share my gender or my race have had since time began. Do I want that for my fellow women filmmakers?” She paused, emphatic, as the wind whipped her hair. “Hell yes. Because every day I dream of a world in which the necessity to talk about this is absent, and when my fellow women artists can speak about their work, rather than campaign to do it.”
I could not hear for all the cheering.
Stories matter. What are we, really, but the sum of all our stories, spun into human form? They are how we connect with each other, how we learn about each other, how we learn about ourselves, and how we conceive all that is possible. We are constantly inundated with both entertainment and news media, each feeding information and imagination, forming and reforming how we see the world, challenging our conceptions — or, far more often, solidifying our closely held stereotypes into presumed fact. Storytelling is still very much a white man’s game, and that matters, too. Because, as easy as it is for the keepers of the status quo to dismiss calls for diversity in media, shouting protective myths like “a good story is a good story,” there is so much more truth in “see the change, be the change” thinking. Studies have consistently shown that when media challenges stereotypes, readers, viewers, and listeners do the same. And, in doing so, they acquire the power to reimagine their own stories.
Take, for example, one of the first and most iconic female characters to be featured in a STEM role: Dr. Dana Scully, a medical doctor and forensic pathologist with a degree in physics. Portrayed as a cool-headed and brilliant FBI agent on prime time’s The X-Files, Scully stood out against the more typical bevy of awkward white men. Over a decade after the show’s first run ended, when asked about their opinions on women in the STEM fields, X-Files fans exhibited what researchers have called “The Scully Effect.” 246 Regular viewers of the show were 43 percent more likely than other women to have considered a career in the STEM fields; many of them also made it a reality. Those who watched the show often were also more likely to have encouraged their daughters or granddaughters to enter the STEM fields, and to believe women in general should have a higher presence there. Two-thirds of women who participated in the study and currently worked in STEM said Dana Scully acted as a role model for them — perhaps because so few real-life ones existed for them growing up.
For those of us who grew up watching female characters save the day in shows like (the way-too-white) Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Veronica Mars, it probably isn’t all too surprising that fictional role models play a major part in women’s lives. Nearly all women in a 2016 global survey felt female role models in film and TV were important. The biggest shocker there is that the number isn’t 100 percent. But more than 60 percent also said that those role models have been influential in their lives — reinforcing the idea that TV shows and movies are more than a brain-numbing exercise after work or an excuse to eat buckets of buttery popcorn. (Just me?) And almost the same number of respondents said their favourite women characters on TV had inspired them to be more ambitious or assertive in particular. The survey of 4,300 women, across nine countries, spanning from the United States to Saudi Arabia to Russia, also found that, on average, one in nine respondents felt their onscreen female role models had helped give them the courage to leave an abusive relationship. In Brazil, that number was as high as one in four.247
What’s more, research also shows that this role-modelling starts young. One study from late 2018, by the American-based Women’s Media Center in partnership with BBC America, found that boys aged five to nine were far more likely to name a male superhero as their top role model than they were to name their own mom or stepmom. (Dads placed first.) Girls in that same age range were, conversely, more likely to name their mom or stepmom or another family member, in that order, before they named a female superhero. (Dads came in last. Sorry dads.) At the same time, girls — and particularly girls of colour — were more likely than boys to say that watching female superheroes made them feel as if they could achieve anything they wanted. Watching their favourite superhero or sci-fi lead made them feel strong, brave, confident, and motivated.
The problem wasn’t that female superheroes were uninspiring to these girls; it was that there weren’t enough of them. Girls were, predictably, more likely than boys to say they wanted more superheroes and sci-fi leads who looked like them. After all, little white boys have their pick of superheroes. Girls of colour — who face an even bigger dearth of choices — were also far more likely than their white counterparts to say they wanted more heroes who looked like them. As A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay put it in the introduction to the report, “In Wrinkle in Time, literally this girl of color saves the universe — not just the world, multiple planets and galaxies . . . that’s such a radical idea as a woman of colour, as anyone who’s outside the industry construct of who’s usually put forth as the hero in cinema.”248
Perhaps this potential for power-shifting ripples is why there isn’t much impetus among media elites to push for change. Depressingly, many women fare worse in leadership and male-dominated fields on TV than they do in real life. Family films are especially likely to influence youth and their visions of a future self, but they offer remarkably grim portrayals of women’s ability to succeed. A study of the top-grossing family films released between 2006 and 2011 found that few women characters occupied “clout positions” in any given sector. Only two women in the 129 family films released during the study’s span were depicted as executive officers of a major corporation. Not one woman was shown as being at the top of the financial sector, legal arena, or media industry. Only one speaking character played a powerful woman in politics across more than 5,800 speaking roles represented in the film sample. One! Things are often bleak for women in the workforce, and they are acutely dismal for women in power, but they’re not that bad. Across all jobs, not just those representative of power, women held only a little over 20 percent of onscreen jobs in family films, and just under 35 percent of those in prime-time programs — a considerably smaller share than those who work in real life.249 So, great.
And for all that female characters in STEM inspire women, there are too few of them onscreen. Across film, television, and streaming content from 2007 to 2017, male characters that worked in the STEM fields — at nearly 63 percent — notably outnumbered the female characters. Of those STEM characters who were women, most were white, accounting for just over 60 percent. Black women made up 23.5 percent of female STEM characters, whereas only just over 8 percent were Asian, 6 percent were Latinx, and less than one percent were Middle Eastern.
Across all roles, women are overwhelmingly less likely to even speak onscreen, and overwhelmingly more likely to be sexualized. Things are far, far worse for LGBTQ+ and racialized characters. One comprehensive 2016 study showed that at least half of film, TV, and streaming stories did not include a single speaking or named Asian character. More than 20 percent of stories included no Black characters. And, only 2 percent of all speaking characters were LGBTQ+. (Of that tiny number, most were white men.) “The complete absence of individuals from these backgrounds,” concluded the report, “is a symptom of a diversity strategy that relies on tokenistic inclusion rather than integration.”250
Not that everything is bad. Truly. Analysis of the top 100 films of 2018 showed an uptick in both female leads and co-leads, as well as the number of women of colour in such roles. Thank you, Crazy Rich Asians. More than forty of those films featured women in those top roles (in 2017 that number was thirty-two), and eleven films put women from under-represented racial groups to the front (versus just four in 2017).251 Still, the fact that it’s taking so long for power balances to shift — and the fact that eleven films is still just eleven films — is inarguably connected to who has the power to tell stories and who does not. Asante alluded in her TIFF rally speech to the fact that those behind the camera control who’s put in front of it, how they’re portrayed, and what words they say. Women accounted for just forty-two directors of the 1,200 top films released from 2007 to 2018. Of those forty-two, four were Black, two were Asian, one was Latinx, and none were Indigenous. White women made up 16 percent of producers; women of colour made up just under 2 percent. Across all production roles in film, women of colour did not make up more than 2 percent.252
On second thought, maybe everything is still bad.
This lopsided balance of power for women of colour is echoed throughout many spheres of life: music,253 business,254 politics,255 to name barely a few. Most film reviewers are also white men.256 Put together, this presents a very clear, not-so-hidden message: white men matter the most, white women matter a little less, and everybody else hardly matters at all. If you listen to those in power, this is a happy accident, not a controlled effort to endlessly reflect systems of power, like two facing mirrors. Because if stories help us dream what’s possible, they also tell us what isn’t possible. And the stories we tell right now remain in the purview of men who protect the status quo, who are the status quo. It’s like a grand echo chamber, where one group of white men is on one side of a cliff shouting You’re Awesome! and another group is on the other shouting It’s All About You! into infinity. Except that men face neither cliffs nor gaps, so that isn’t quite right. Okay. Picture these two groups of men standing really close together and shouting I Matter Most! into each other’s faces. Yes, that’s about it.
In 2017, shortly after Lemonade should have won Album of the Year at the Grammys, Solange Knowles posted, and then quickly deleted, a call to action on Twitter: “Create your own committees, build your own institutions, give your friends awards, award yourself, and be the gold you wanna hold, my Gs.” Media big and small covered the criticism, with most journalists entirely missing the point. Local Ontario paper the Waterloo Region Record said Knowles “vented her anger” over her sister’s loss and went on a “rant.” It also corrected her initial tweet, which lamented that only two Black artists had won Album of the Year in the past two decades: “Solange’s statement was factually inaccurate as Lauryn Hill, OutKast, the late Ray Charles, and Herbie Hancock have all won the gong over the last 20 years.” Oh, have they all?257 Billboard magazine characterized her tweet as a “rather radical suggestion on how to make sure the Knowles family doesn’t sit through another disappointing night.”258 Which, I mean, come on.
Such subtly racist coverage worked hard to protect the status quo. It said, Look, here is just another angry Black woman, and it said, Look at them always wanting more. What it really said was, Don’t listen. It said: Yes, fine, the Grammys — and by extension the Oscars and the Emmys — can do better, but they’re still what matters. Sure, they may be broken, but they’re the best we have. Just keep trying to succeed and stay stuck in this system and one day if you try really hard you might be the fifth Black artist to win Album of the Year, and wouldn’t that be nice? But don’t leave these systems that never planned for your success to build more of your own, that (status quo–enforcing) voice might as well say. Don’t stop caring about what the white, male majority thinks. Don’t stop striving to win this rigged game. That would be radical! Yet, that is exactly what the next generation of creators is doing. And if that’s radical, they’re saying, well, good, because radical self-love is also what’s going to bring the old exclusionary systems crumbling down into irrelevance.
“Among this generation of filmmakers and my peers,” said Tamil-Canadian filmmaker V. T. Nayani, “it’s like, ‘Yeah it would be nice to get an Oscar or an Emmy, but that’s not the point.’ If people are seeing our films, that’s what we care about. Those awards shows are not really reflective of us. We’re all putting less stock in them.” In addition to filmmaking, Nayani has also worked as a producer, focusing on authentic storytelling. For her, that means supporting women and non-binary creators from Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities to do the work they wanted to do, too. It wasn’t enough to make her own films, she stressed. She also had to hold the door open. More than that, really. She referenced a constant reminder pinned to her wall, quoting Ava DuVernay: We’re not waiting for other people to open the door. We’re building our own houses with our own keys and our own doors and then creating opportunities for others.
The Highlander-esque idea that “there can be only one” does not serve creators of colour. That’s called the scarcity mentality, said Nayani, and at its core, it does nothing more than inhibit solidarity and work to reinforce white systems of power. The cool thing about the current moment in film, she added, is that technology has worked to democratize creation and to allow for many diverse perspectives. People can circumvent regular pathways to filmmaking (i.e., securing funding and resources from old white dudes) and make the story they want to tell with an iPhone and a minimal budget. That means a huge shift from old approaches to diversity, wherein people of colour were predominantly used as subjects, not granted agency as creators. Now, she said, people are being seen through their own lens. White creators (specifically, white, straight, cis men) have long had the privilege of telling a multitude of different stories about themselves, from infinite viewpoints, reimagining themselves and what’s possible over and over again; now people of colour are wresting access to that same privilege of multiplicity.
For Nayani, inclusive and authentic storytelling doesn’t mean making space within existing institutions; it means helping people to create their own spaces and to create them everywhere. “I will make a very different film from another Tamil girl from Vancouver or Montreal or even the other side of Scarborough,” she said, adding that all those voices together will help to reimagine different futures — to reimagine stories about Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour not necessarily as singular narratives of oppression, prejudice, and racism, but also as stories about people who thrive, love, and have joy. Let’s instead feed into the idea of abundance, she stressed. Let’s work toward a future in which everybody recognizes that these stories deserve space to be told. Let’s dream up new worlds, she said, that allow us to be seen how we’d like to be seen and invent how we’d like our lives to look. Blockbusters like Black Panther are not the end goal but rather the very beginning of what’s possible.
“The people who have been telling the stories,” echoed transgender filmmaker Luis De Filippis, “aren’t the people who are living the stories.” In the case of transgender characters, they added, that often means directors are not concerned about who their characters are as people. They’re concerned about anatomy. They’re concerned about the mechanics of transitioning. Transgender characters seem to be either vilified, eroticized, or sensationalized. Even when the story is presumably a positive one, the formula becomes: this transgender character needs to come out; in doing so they learn to accept themselves; and their family, in turn, also learns to accept them (or not). But a transgender person’s life does not, obviously, begin and end with their transition, said De Filippis. So where are all the stories about their actual lives?
In response to this question, De Filippis created the short film For Nonna Anna, which went on to win a Special Jury Award at Sundance259 and also the Best Short Narrative Award at the Atlanta International Film Festival. The tender, beautiful film shows a shared moment of vulnerability that unfolds between a granddaughter — who, yes, has already transitioned — and her elderly grandmother. The film, De Filippis said, started with frustration. Frustration with not seeing themselves onscreen, not seeing their story onscreen, not seeing their family onscreen. But they almost didn’t make it at all. Not because there was no support for transgender stories outside the expected tropes — although that is a challenge — but because they also didn’t see any directors who worked outside the stereotypical, aggressive, masculine style. Those were the methods they saw endlessly replicated in film school; they had tried to make films by copying those methods and it had never seemed to work. De Filippis did not have an abrasive personality at all. Maybe, they thought, I’m just not cut out for this business.
Then they saw a behind-the-scenes documentary with director Sofia Coppola (a person who, they add, does not come without her own problematic perspectives). Coppola had such a laid-back, soft-spoken manner. She spoke with her hand over her mouth. Something clicked. Oh, that’s me! De Filippis thought. That’s how I direct. If she can do it, I can do it. So when they filmed For Nonna Anna, they decided to run their set differently — exactly how they had always wanted to. For them, it was a new way to approach an old medium. Every morning on set, DeFilippis started with a check-in, going around the circle to genuinely inquire how everybody was doing, how they were feeling, what they wanted to share about themselves. After lunch, everybody — everybody, not just the actors — participated in a dance break. The result was a film set that worked in collaboration, without anger or ego. That is something that takes effort, stressed De Filippis. If you want it, you have to plan for it. It worked, though, they added. Despite doing away with the tried-and-true regimen of a film set, For Nonna Anna finished filming an entire day ahead of schedule.
“I was able to be myself on set. And because I knew who I was, I knew how I wanted to run things and that’s how they were run,” they said. “It wasn’t a decision, so much as I was forced into it. Obviously the other way wasn’t working.” The ability to be wholly, absolutely who you want to be is what power is really about, added De Filippis. “It really has a lot to do with how much society allows you to be yourself and the things you can get away with while being yourself.” Take every horrible thing we’ve heard about men since the rise of the #MeToo movement, for example, they added. “It’s just because they’ve been being themselves and they’ve been allowed to be such precise iterations of themselves.” Men had felt the complete ability to be themselves on any given day, in any given space. They had never felt the need to hide themselves. Well, now neither does De Filippis.
If entertainment media has done a poor job of representing those who buy movie tickets and albums, so too has every other form of storytelling. News media, in particular, is a stronghold of the Old Boys’ Club, demarcating the issues, voices, and perspectives of those it deems most important under the guise of objectivity. Historically, that has meant a whitewashing of both the news itself and the newsrooms that produce it. It’s essential to note that men of colour lose in these systems, too. Former Globe and Mail journalist Sunny Dhillon sent much-needed shockwaves through the Canadian publishing industry in October 2018 when he wrote an essay on Medium explaining why he quit. “That final conversation inside the bureau chief’s office crystallized what I had felt: What I brought to the newsroom did not matter. And it was at that moment that being a person of colour at a paper and in an industry that does not have enough of us — particularly at the top — felt more futile than ever before.”260
In his essay, Dhillon pointed to another article published on Poynter, introducing a new tool, “A Survival Kit for Journalists of Color.”261 In the piece, Dr. Seema Yasmin, a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow, explains why she and her colleague Michael Grant, also a Fellow, launched the project. She addressed some common experiences that journalists of colour face in newsrooms in North America. “You left because the editors shut down your pitches,” she wrote. “Or because they said yes but never ran those columns, the ones you felt most passionate about, the stories of the El Salvadorian women who folded dough into triangles to send their daughters to private school, the young African American lawyer fighting police brutality cases. You left because a woman at work kept running her fingers through your braids and when your co-workers said: ‘Go to HR,’ you said, ‘But she is the head of HR.’” The toolkit, she added, is meant to help journalists of colour find “quickfire, in-the-moment responses for everyday racist microaggressions,” and also to guide them through “deliberative exercises that help you build community and recruit allies in the newsroom.”
Such tools can be especially vital for Indigenous women and women of colour in the newsroom. Edmonton-based multimedia journalist Anya Zoledziowski wrote about the layered challenges such journalists face, in a March 2019 Tyee article that shared the findings of her recent academic thesis, which she wrote while a student at the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism.262 “Although many racialized experiences traverse gender lines,” she wrote, “women of colour simultaneously battle stereotypes about their womanhood (crazy, too ambitious, ditzy) and their racial identities (incompetent, ethnic, only interested in ‘diverse’ storytelling).” She was not immune to such racism on the job. “In a previous journalism job, I showed up on day one eager to learn and contribute,” she explained. “Within just a few months, my boss at the time told me I was hired ‘to be the diversity.’ The same superior called me ‘fiery’ after I questioned ethics around our Indigenous coverage. In various other positions, colleagues have asked me how to cover ‘people of colour’ issues in a way that made it seem they assumed I have a third eye with an omniscient, racialized lens. Situations like these created a lot of pressure.”
A 2018 study of newsrooms across the United States showed just how direly white these spaces can be. Media, in general, skews male, with men writing about 60 percent of online and print stories, and being featured as prime-time anchors slightly more than that.263 On the whole, men write most of the news we read, getting 90 percent of sports bylines, 67 percent of technology and media coverage, and 66 percent of international, news, and political coverage. Women are present, but outnumbered, in management. Of all newsroom managers, just over 40 percent were found to be women. At least one woman was among the top-three editors at more than three-quarters of newsrooms. Among that female minority, women of colour were even less represented in newsrooms.264 Just over 83 percent of all journalists, including leaders, were white. Of all employees, 31 percent were white women. Meanwhile, slightly under 3 percent were Black women, a tiny bit less were Latinx women, and just under 2.5 percent were Asian women. And, most dismally of all, just 0.16 percent were Indigenous women. The percentage of newsroom leaders was roughly the same — still depressing.
These disparities are reflected in the types of stories that are told, and they’re also reflected in whose voices appear in media stories. When it comes to “expert” sources, women’s voices, and diverse women’s voices in particular, are rarely heard. This absolutely feeds into public perceptions of women as leaders, reinforcing the idea that women have nothing to contribute to the conversation and nor do they have the credentials to guide it. They are, in all ways, not part of it. This dynamic is something that high-achieving, groundbreaking women are clearly not keen about. As one woman put it in a 2018 study looking at the exclusion of women’s voices in media: “You get tired of hearing just men all the time about everything. I just don’t care what men have to say about pretty much anything anymore, not because they are not experts, but it’s just — I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, I don’t care anymore. I’d rather hear what women or people of colour and Indigenous people have to say.”265
To help chart just how wide these inequalities are, Canadian organization Informed Opinions teamed up with researchers at Simon Fraser University to create the Gender Gap Tracker. Using big data analytics and text data mining, the tracker provides real-time numbers on the breakdown of men and women quoted in Canadian news media, including the CBC, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, HuffPost, and more.266 I spoke with Maite Taboada, the SFU linguistics professor who headed the school’s research team, about what the tracker had revealed in its first month of data-pulling. Not once, she told me, had the percentage of women quoted tipped over 30 percent. (The day I checked it last, in April 2019, it sat at 26 percent.) Taboada said that she wasn’t surprised the numbers were so low — previous research had consistently pegged representation around that same percentage — but she was surprised that the numbers stayed so consistent, day in and day out, across all media outlets. It was habit. A bad habit. Her hope was that by measuring representation every day and by making those numbers public, media would no longer be able to feign ignorance. Consistently, they failed. Consistently, they told the public in so many (lack of) words that some people were experts and some were not, some were smart and some weren’t, some were important and some were not, some could be anything and some were too invisible to ever have the chance.
This messaging extends far past entertainment and news media into advertising and brand mascot-ing, into art galleries and onto bookshelves, and into even the smallest and most seemingly innocuous of places. Take, for instance, the Canadian indie greeting-card company To:Her. A group of women got the idea for the company after two of them could not find a card, no matter how much they hunted, that represented anybody but white people. Dorcas Siwoku was looking for a congratulatory card to give a young Black woman in her life. Oana Romaniuc was attending the wedding of two friends, an interracial couple. Where were the cards showing anyone resembling these special people in their lives? Both women shared their dilemma with Monica Romaniuc, who is Oana’s sister and also Siwoku’s co-worker. She brought them together for coffee and, after chatting, all three decided it was inconceivable that even greeting cards were so white. And not only white: so hell-bent on reinforcing gender roles and stereotypes. They remained baffled even as they worked on getting To:Her off the ground. “At one point, we were like, ‘How has this not been done yet?’” said Siwoku. “It’s 2017.”
I sat down with the trio about one year after they launched, heading into the 2018 winter holiday season. In addition to having their regular line of cards depicting Black women, Black couples, and Black families (not all nuclear, of course), they had also recently debuted a line of holiday cards. One showed a group of women in winter wear, no words. Another cheekily remarked, “Happy Holidays. Yes, I’m still single.” One read, “Congratulations on surviving that [awkward holiday gathering] on your own.” Their favourite, they said, in between bursts of laughter, was one of a woman in a bubble bath with the caption, “Wishing you a pleasurable holiday.” Because what do we do when we’re taking a bath? Wink, wink. The cards, they told me, were not only meant to redefine who got to experience a so-called Hallmark moment, but what life milestones were worthy of the name. Other cards the company sells include tributes to single motherhood, ending unhealthy relationships (“Congratulations on leaving that asshole”), and excellent intercourse (“Thanks for the great sex”).
The women come up with the concepts themselves, with input from their customers and friends, who are also craving a break from all the homogeneity, and Oana Romaniuc designs and illustrates all the cards. Many cards later, the first one the team designed, in response to her initial empty-handed search, is still Siwoku’s favourite. It’s called “Black Girl Magic,” contains no text, and shows a Black woman in a swirling yellow gown. Description copy for the card tells a potential purchaser that she is “confident in her skin” and “unapologetically takes up the space she deserves.” Siwoku stressed that what To:Her does is not “heavy.” “When I think about what we do,” she said, “it’s a seemingly small thing. It’s a greeting card.” But it’s also a powerful way for them to influence a larger conversation about who matters, who deserves to be celebrated, who gets to be happy. She knew what it would have meant to her to have that kind of card when she was the same age as the young woman she was shopping for that fateful day, years ago now. It would have meant everything.
Back at TIFF’s Share Her Journey rally, actor and director Nandita Das took the stage. “Good morning, everybody. I have no paper, no notes, no thoughts,” she told the crowd, laughter punctuating her last admission. “I’m here just to share my feelings. They asked me to speak and I was like, ‘Mmm, am I being called because I’m Brown?’ Brown representation. You know we’re all into diversity in a big way. Is it because I’m Indian? I represent South Asia.” In seconds, Das had exposed the inherent tension between diversity and tokenism, and the difficulties in parsing which is which — particularly when you are the person upon which they are being enacted. “I just want to be treated as a person,” she said, emphasizing the last word. “But sadly there is no escaping our identity. I think we all have multiple identities. Some given. Some acquired. We move from one to another, depending on the context. I’m a big champion of multiple identities. But I realize the identity of a woman just doesn’t leave me. For better or for worse, I’m constantly reminded I’m a woman.”
I often wonder if the reason why diversity initiatives fail is because those who create them, fundamentally, do not want to help shift power at all. For those of us who benefit from the status quo, it is both daunting and uncomfortable to acknowledge our stake in maintaining systems of misogyny and white supremacy. It is even harder to truly release our investment in those systems, even if we think we want to (and I’m certainly not convinced we want to). Diversity policies try to solve these inequities with numbers but do little of the hard work needed to probe work cultures, internalized discrimination, and access to power. They say: You’re here, what more do you want? But we know by now that simply having a presence is not enough; it’s the bare minimum. The problem is that white people — white women included — keep thinking we have all the answers. We don’t. I don’t.
Here’s the thing: I know that even as I try to shine light on these issues, in a sincere effort to spotlight an integral piece of the wider conversation on gender and power, I am also acting as a gatekeeper. I am deciding who to interview and how to tell their stories. Yes, I am doing my best to listen and to share this platform that I know I am privileged to have. But if I want things to truly change, as I do, I also know I must routinely interrogate what it means to extricate myself from these systems of power in which I am both a loser and a winner. Confronting the myriad ways in which we — in which I — benefit from racism, colonialism, and sexism is not a one-time thing. To work, it has to be, well, work. It must become part of a daily practice, something I do over and over, and even then I know I won’t get it right. That’s only more of a reason to keep trying. Good intentions do not erase racism. That’s true for individuals — and it’s also true for companies, organizations, and other groups that claim they want to do better. Unless they’re truly ready to reckon with what it means to reallocate power, their diversity initiatives are nothing more than feel-good optics, invested not in inclusion, but in ultimately maintaining the status quo.
Which is probably part of the reason why diversity initiatives don’t, in fact, work. Equal-employment-opportunity language, one of the most standard diversity-friendly flags that companies use, for example, is actually more likely to deter the people it is intended to attract. You know the phrase, often found at the end of job postings: “Company X is an equal opportunity employer. All candidates will receive equal consideration without regard to . . .” or “We welcome applications from . . .” followed by a list of people the company almost certainly does still discriminate against.
One 2018 study confirmed previous research that showed, yes, such statements do signal to people of colour, as well as people with disabilities and those who are LGBTQ+, that they are less likely to face discrimination and restrictive stereotyping in the hiring process.267 (That, unfortunately, is not always a safe assumption.) At the same time, such language also greatly increases the perception of tokenism, a factor that dissuades those outside the status quo from applying and outweighs the benefits of such “we promise we’re not racist” disclaimers. This effect was shown to be pronounced in cities with majority white populations, such as Houston, Denver, and San Francisco. There, more than two-thirds of job-seekers who were people of colour believed the statements signalled that they’d be token hires, and their consequent fear of tokenism often made people less likely to apply — 50 percent less likely, in fact, when it came to San Francisco.
People are right to be wary. In general, diversity training often backfires, and in some cases it actually increases animosity toward women and people of colour.268 Participants fail to grasp the complex and often controversial aspects of dismantling racism and sexism in the workplace, and those same workplaces rarely make those complex discussions part of their regular workplace culture. All of which means that employees who are predisposed to fear challenges to the status quo leave their training rejecting the idea that they are “villains” and bemoaning the fact that they now have to “walk on eggshells” around people who “cannot take a joke.” Even when positive effects are detected, they rarely last beyond a few days.269 Individual bias and workplace culture are just too strong — and the workplace is often not truly diverse enough to reach change organically. Plus, as much as diversity training often triggers backlash, it also reinforces tokenism, sometimes putting women and people of colour into the “spokesperson” position whereby they either have to defend their experiences of discrimination or pretend they don’t exist. As a result, they often, understandably, don’t speak at all.
“Just once I want to speak to a room of white people who know they are there because they are the problem,” wrote author Ijeoma Oluo in a March 2019 Guardian article that reminded readers anti-racism work is not about making white people feel better.270 “Myself and many of the attendees of color often leave these talks feeling tired and disheartened, but I still show up and speak. I show up in the hopes that maybe, possibly, this talk will be the one that finally breaks through, or will bring me a step closer to the one that will. I show up and speak for people of color who can’t speak freely, so that they might feel seen and heard. I speak because there are people of color in the room who need to hear that they shouldn’t have to carry the burden of racial oppression, while those who benefit from that same oppression expect anti-racism efforts to meet their needs first.”
That white fragility keeps power structures in check by turning the focus back on white people, painting their racism as misunderstood or unfair or both. Robin DiAngelo is the author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. In a piece published on Medium, in June 2018, DiAngelo explained white people’s tendency to shut down dialogue or frame themselves as victims as soon as dialogue in anti-racism workshops departs from abstract concepts. “The moment I name some racially problematic dynamic or action happening in the room in the moment — for example, ‘Sharon, may I give you some feedback? While I understand it wasn’t intentional, your response to Jason’s story invalidates his experience as a black man’ — white fragility erupts,” she wrote. “Sharon defensively explains that she was misunderstood and then angrily withdraws, while others run in to defend her by re-explaining ‘what she really meant.’ The point of the feedback is now lost, and hours must be spent repairing this perceived breach. And, of course, no one appears concerned about Jason. Shaking my head, I think to myself, ‘You asked me here to help you see your racism, but by god, I’d better not actually help you see your racism.’”271
Which loops us right back to the reality that diversity initiatives often don’t work because white people simply cannot get over themselves. They write half-hearted policies that don’t extend past tokenism. The appearance of diversity is valued over true inclusion. People hire people who look like them or share the same interests as them — preferential bias disguised as a spark of connection.272 Managers give less or no weight to the poor performance of those who look like them, but significant weight to those who do not.273 People who exemplify the status quo too often want a pat on the back for doing the right thing and yet they want to change nothing about themselves, maintaining the exact power they have, which is all of it.
In confronting this, though, some organizations may find a silver lining. For those that truly want to change, behavioural science has an answer: ditch the diversity initiatives and the long, difficult (if not futile) fight to eradicate organizational bias through individual improvement. Take the decisions out of the hands of individuals and infuse equality into the design of the company itself. In other words, redesign organizations so they cannot make biased choices in the first place.
In her book What Works: Gender Equality by Design, Iris Bohnet, a Harvard University professor and director of the school’s Women and Public Policy Program, argues for companies to adopt increased transparency (so they can honestly assess how they’re doing) and policies that require a critical mass of women and people of colour (something this book has examined in depth). Get rid of tests and evaluation tools that can invite individual bias. Don’t go with your gut; it cannot be trusted. Embark on studies that evaluate how current practices work. Basically, realize that every current system invites bias and has to go; build new, better ones based on data, not on what you think will work. “Big data improves our understanding of what is broken and needs fixing, blind or comparative evaluation procedures help us hire the best instead of those who look the part, and role models shape what people think is possible,” she wrote, adding that, under behaviour design, there is a clear definition of success, determined by a clear definition of engagement. Fair enough, but who gets to decide what those definitions are?
In answer to some of these inequity challenges, certain companies have started to rely on artificial intelligence to delete bias from their hiring and promotion practices. Which highlights another lesson: who gets to decide what’s unbiased also matters. Amazon, for example, infamously scrapped its supposedly unbiased recruitment tool after the company discovered the AI had taught itself to discriminate against women. The computer models were taught to vet applicants using job applications from across a ten-year period — most of which came from men. Thus, it learned that male candidates were preferable and started to penalize applications that used the word “women’s,” as in “women’s club.”274 Microsoft’s chatbot, Tay, learned racism from interacting with users on Twitter to “get smarter.”275 In March 2019, the American government sued Facebook, claiming it employed discriminatory algorithms that excluded whole swaths of people from seeing housing ads.276 These are only three examples of many that show humans have, essentially, created AI to be as racist and sexist as they are. Considering who has the power to create technology, however, maybe this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.
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