Slashdot Mirror
A 60 Minutes Story on Gender Equality Accidentally Proved the Persistence of Patriarchy (qz.com)
Over at Quartz, Ephrat Livni reports that a 60 Minutes story about gender equality accidentally proved the persistence of patriarchy. Reader theodp shares the report: Good intentions are nice, but they aren't enough, the TV news show 60 Minutes recently proved. The show's producers apparently meant well when they decided to do a segment on women in technology and the gender gap, which aired on March 4. But they ended up punching women in the gut, as the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, puts it in her response to the segment. Ultimately, 60 Minutes featured a man, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. His [tech-backed] organization's mission is to expand access to computer science education in schools.
Women technologists like Saujani who were tapped to appear on the show about a year ago and worked with producers to provide research and interviews, ended up on the cutting room floor while Partovi spoke on their behalf. Here is the cruel irony: As a result, 60 Minutes' segment was accidentally exceptionally effective-it proved that women in tech really can't catch a break. [...] Ayah Bdeir, the founder of STEM learning toy company littleBits, also responded to the episode in a Medium post. She noted that she worked with 60 Minutes for a year, planning interviews, providing research, talking to the producers and reporters, telling her story and that of her organization, which is focused on closing the gender gap in technology. Yet producers wrote to her last August to say that the focus of the segment had shifted and that littleBits would no longer be central in the story. In an email, a producer explained to her, 'It's not that the important points you made in your interview are ignored in the story, or that you didn't make them very effectively, they're just made by others'.
Women technologists like Saujani who were tapped to appear on the show about a year ago and worked with producers to provide research and interviews, ended up on the cutting room floor while Partovi spoke on their behalf. Here is the cruel irony: As a result, 60 Minutes' segment was accidentally exceptionally effective-it proved that women in tech really can't catch a break. [...] Ayah Bdeir, the founder of STEM learning toy company littleBits, also responded to the episode in a Medium post. She noted that she worked with 60 Minutes for a year, planning interviews, providing research, talking to the producers and reporters, telling her story and that of her organization, which is focused on closing the gender gap in technology. Yet producers wrote to her last August to say that the focus of the segment had shifted and that littleBits would no longer be central in the story. In an email, a producer explained to her, 'It's not that the important points you made in your interview are ignored in the story, or that you didn't make them very effectively, they're just made by others'.
Nurses are majority female, and there's no talk at all about encouraging more men to join that high paying profession.
Paramedics are majority male (slim majority, not nearly the imbalance of nurses) and there's constant pressure to "fix" the situation.
There's never pressure to get more women in to menial or low paying jobs, and there's never pressure to get more men in to any job. There's also no pressure to get more men to win custody battles, or to believe men who have been victims of domestic violence or sexual assault. There's also a gigantic funding difference in research to cure diseases that hit mainly women (i.e. breast cancer) vs those that hit mainly men (i.e. prostate cancer).
Not 60 Minutes, but I've done extensive work with NPR producing programs. Generally the reason someone ends up on cutting room floors (at least on radio) is that they sound bad. The tone or timber of their voice is grating, the pacing of their speech is off, their speech is loaded with ums and uhs, something like that. Not that I've worked in television, but I suspect the methodology is the same - an interviewee doesn't look photogenic, doesn't maintain eye contact with the camera or maintains a kind of psychopathic stare. At NPR we would often interview three or four people who said essentially the same thing, and picked the best one or two to air. The rest is dropped.
And others have said this as well, but I suspect the real reason the CEO of Littlebits is upset is because she missed out on 3 or 4 minutes of free advertising (albeit with the 60 Minutes demographic, which I think is people over 60, so probably not her target audience anyway).