On Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran a special section reporting on the paper’s recent conference entitled “Women in the Economy: An Executive Task Force.” One of the taskforce members was Geena Davis, the Academy Award winning actress and more recently founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. The Journal noted that Ms. Davis, “has become an advocate of gender equality in children’s entertainment” and a critic in general of gender portrayal in film and in preschool programming.
In a Q & A session at the conference, Davis told the audience that the situation is now so dire for girls that she does not allow her own eight-year-old daughter to watch TV, “unless I’m there … and I make a running commentary the whole time to take away any negative impact.” Davis briefed the gathering on one of her institute’s most disturbing discoveries: “They found that the more hours of television a girl watches the fewer options she believes she has in life. And the more hours a boy watches, the more sexist his views become.”
