The full text of the letter is as follows. A downloadable PDF version is also available.

The Women's Media Center also has an online petition where the public can join the campaign for a woman FCC Chair.

 March 22, 2013

The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC  20500

Dear Mr. President,

We're writing to make sure that with all that crosses your desk, you see a piece of good news. The best qualified candidates to chair the Federal Communications Commission are all women. You will be able make good policy and good history at the same time.

You have the chance to democratize the media with one key appointment when you nominate the next Chair of the Federal Communications Commission. We are writing to urge you to pick a woman. 

This would be a truly historic appointment. There has never been a female chair of the Federal Communications Commission and a woman chair would go far to making women more visible and powerful in the media and technology.

As we step into 2013, women are still underrepresented in the leadership of America's media and its technology industries. Women hold only 6 percent of all TV and radio station licenses and under one-third of TV news directors are women. Of top executives working for technology companies just over 5 percent are women. Media companies have some of the most powerful resources at their disposal in shaping attitudes and culture. And as the Internet transforms American media and telecommunications, it has become central to the nation’s competitiveness as well as the future of culture, news, and communication.

A number of well-qualified candidates are reported by The National Journal to be under consideration for the top job at the FCC, including  former OECD Ambassador, Karen Kornbluh, current FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel, Clinton administration FCC executives Susan Ness and Cathy Sandoval.

While there is no easy fix to getting women into the top jobs in the telecom and media industries, the government watchdog can and should be headed by a woman.  The FCC holds broad regulatory power over the most important media, communications, and technology companies in the United States. Plus, there is a powerful "bully pulpit" effect to having women at the head of this agency.

You earned the majority of the women’s vote because you represented views on issues from violence against women to pay equity. In your second term you can demonstrate your commitment to equality in leadership in a different but equally important area of the federal government, oversight of the media and telecom industries.

The FCC’s broad regulatory authority over huge swaths of the U.S. economy makes it a very powerful government agency and over the next year it will face a series of critical decision points – from how to structure a complex wireless spectrum auction to how to respond to an anticipated decision in a legal challenge over its authority to enforce its “Open Internet” rules. In addition, it must decide how to help improve broadband speed, service, and pricing in the United States when its rules are under pressure from industry.  In the late 1990s the US had the highest broadband speeds and penetration rates of almost anywhere but today the U.S. comes in sixteenth and the average U.S. cost per megabit per second is several times that in South Korea, France, and the UK.

The next FCC chair must be someone who is willing to put the public’s interests first and work to ensure that American businesses and workers have the tools they need to ensure U.S. competitiveness in the 21st century.  Consumers want an independent FCC chair – not an industry insider – but someone who is willing to put the needs of consumers over the desires of industry executives.

The identity and personal experience of a regulatory chief matters. William Kennard, for example, who was appointed the first African-American chair of the agency by President Bill Clinton, made a top priority of closing the digital divide for African-Americans and for Americans with disabilities. Never in the 80 years of the FCC has a woman of any race or group been its chair, though women have been the nation's majority for a long time.

The post atop the FCC is one of the most important opportunities available to raise the bar for representational diversity and decision-making in the media and telecom sectors, which are the infrastructure of this generation and of the future.

This petition has already been signed by activists from across the country who agree with us that the time is now for the FCC to be headed by a woman. The time is now. 

Most Respectfully,

Siobhan “Sam” Bennett
President & CEO of She Should Run

Julie Burton
President of The Women’s Media Center

Melanie Campbell
CEO & Executive Director of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation

Geena Davis
Founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

Margot Dorfman
CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce

Madeline Di Nonno
Executive Director of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

Lauren Embrey
Chair of the Board of The Women's Media Center

Gloria Feldt
Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner
Executive Director & CEO of MomsRising

Sandra Finley
President & CEO of the League of Black Women

Jaclyn Friedman
Executive Director of Women, Action & the Media

Jane Fonda
Co-Founder of The Women’s Media Center

Kim Gandy
President & CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence

Andrea Gleaves
Chair of the Women's Information Network

Eleanor Hinton Hoytt
President and CEO of Black Women’s Health Imperative

Grace Kaissal
Political Director of the Women's Information Network

Shelby Knox
Director of Women’s Rights Campaigns for Change.org

Terry Lawler
Executive Director of New York Women in Film & Television

Pat Mitchell
President and CEO of The Paley Center for Media

Robin Morgan
Co-Founder of The Women’s Media Center

Terry O’Neill
President, National Organization for Women Foundation

Anika Rahman
President & CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women

Susan Scanlan
Chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations

Karen See
President of the Coalition of Labor Union Women

Eleanor Smeal
President of the Feminist Majority Foundation

Katherine Spillar
Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine

Gloria Steinem
Co-Founder of The Women’s Media Center

Dee Strum
National President of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women

Linda Young
Chair of the National Women’s Political Caucus

It was apparent that sexism at the Oscars was going to be a huge morning-after conversation when, less than two hours into the broadcast, Buzzfeed posted a list of “6 Sexist Things That Have Already Happened At The Oscars” (later amended to “9 Sexist Things”). Shortly thereafter, New York Magazine’s The Cut offered “Seth MacFarlane's Sexist Jokes, Transcribed.”

Slate’s movie critic Dana Stevens, in her review of the show, wrote that despite the show’s theme—“a defensive anxiety about the ascendant power of women”— it “was a night dominated by a trio of powerful, glittering, seemingly indomitable women.”

But the key word there is seemingly.

It’s clear it was the women who rocked the broadcast awards, from Adele to Jennifer Hudson to Michelle Obama. But when the time came to hand out statuettes, it was still the men who took home all the prizes.

Across 19 categories, 140 men were nominated for awards versus 35 women. In the end, just seven women took home non-acting Oscars. (Women won in categories for Animated Feature Film, Documentary Short, Costume Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Sound Editing and Music, Original Song.)

It would have been great if all 35 women nominated had taken home prizes, but even that still wouldn’t have fixed the huge imbalance in the nominations. For that, we have to look deeper at the structure of Hollywood, of which the Academy Awards are really just a snapshot.

As we noted in our newly released Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2013 report, exactly how women’s voices are missing in nearly all the behind-the-scenes positions in Hollywood feature films – as writers, as editors, as cinematographers. Women were only nine percent of directors of the 250 top-grossing domestic films of 2012. Says Martha M. Lauzen, executive director of Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, which releases an annual “Celluloid Ceiling” report, “[the] director role is traditionally the most male role. With narrative films, whether they are independently produced or produced by a studio, there is still that celluloid ceiling women have to overcome.”

Women do represent a larger share of directors when it comes to independent films particularly on documentaries where, according to a study of high-profile film festivals, women made up 39 percent of documentary directors.

But when it comes to narrative films – which where most of Hollywood’s attention lies – there is still a gap for women directors. According to the same study of film festivals women accounted for only 18 percent of directors of narrative films.

Is it simply a lack of experience that is keeping women out of the director’s chair? It’s not as if resumes keep men from being given keys to big budget films. As Women’s Media Center Co-Founder Jane Fonda recently remarked on Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, director Marc Webb made a low-budget film, (500) Days of Summer, and then was given a budget of $230 million to make The Amazing Spiderman, while Rupert Sanders had no prior feature film experience before directing the $170-million Snow White and the Huntsman.

As Robin Morgan says, the “director's chair is perceived as a place of command and control”—and studios seem to mostly perceive that role as reserved for men.

But what’s interesting is that female directors bring more women into behind-the-scenes positions. Sundance Institute and Women in Film commissioned Stacy Smith, Ph.D. and University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism for a report, Exploring the Barriers and Opportunities for Independent Women Filmmakers. They found female directors facilitate behind-the-camera equality. When compared to films directed by men, those directed by women feature more women content creators (writers, producers, cinematographers, editors) behind the camera. This is true in both narratives and documentaries.

So when we finally get to the Oscar night and find seven categories (including Directing, Cinematography, and Writing, original screenplay) that have no women nominated and five with exactly one woman nominated, we’ve come to the culmination of a long process of women’s voices being squeezed out, ignored, or entirely missing from production of some of our most influential cultural products.

This could be why the Academy Awards sees nothing wrong with picking a host who starts off the night with a joke about actresses’ breasts, makes an 9-year-old in the audience the subject of sexual innuendo, and tags a movie about a dedicated female CIA officer with an eye-roll-inducing joke direct from 1950 about how women “never let anything go.”

Normally, sexism in Hollywood hides beneath the surface, but during last’s night Oscars we got to see it on full display—a solid reminder how our sexist media culture works. Hollywood is organized by power, and the Academy Awards are a reflection of that: white men on top, women and people of color at the bottom.

It’s telling that the Academy might not even think a lack of viewpoint diversity is a problem for them. During last year’s Oscars season, the Los Angeles Times quoted the now-late Frank Pierson, a governor and former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as stating, “I don’t see any reason why the academy should represent the entire American population . . . We represent the professional filmmakers, and if that doesn’t reflect the general population, so be it.”

Still, it seems that drumbeat about the lack of women behind the camera is getting louder. Reports like The Status of the Women in the U.S. Media, Celluloid Ceiling and Exploring the Barriers and Opportunities for Independent Women Filmmakers have been making more and more people aware of the lack of women’s voices in Hollywood films. Meanwhile, during the Oscars, many other people joined our conversation at #OscarWomen on Twitter, or started their own talk about sexism, racism, and homophobia in Hollywood and in the Oscars broadcast itself. The almost instantaneous critique of sexist and other offensive commentary during the broadcast from all quarters is a good sign that change is on its way.

When the audience speaks up, Hollywood will listen. The 2014 Academy Awards show can have a less sexist host (and here, at last, we agree with Seth MacFarlane: why can’t Tina and Amy host everything?) but we’re also hoping the 2014 awards will have more women overall.

Announcer:  You're listening to Women's Media Center live with Robin Morgan, on 1580 AM; a CBS station.

Robin:  Welcome to Women's Media Center live, I'm Robin Morgan. You are listening to us on CBS Radio Station 1580 AM in the Washington DC area, or you're streaming us on the web at WMClive.com. That's the site where you can also find links to podcast of all our previous shows. We want to hear from you too; tweet us at #wmclive or email us at womensmediacenterlive@gmail.com.

Get your popcorn popped because this week we go to the movies. It's award season and festival season so where are the women? Well, they're here. We covered the Athena Film Festival in all its feminist glory and Sundance, which is experiencing girl power. Then, for a close up at of sexism in Hollywood we talk with actress Kathy Bates and Jane Fonda. This week we also have news you can use and a surrealism corner too. But first we have to go inside the headlines.

Hilary Rodham Clinton is no longer our Secretary of State. With all due respect to John Kerry, I already feel less safe. These four years while carrying out Obama's foreign policy and doing rapid response to global crisis; Hilary has quietly built her own agenda. Dramatic wins were denied her; no peace in the Middle East, no rapprochement with Iran or North Korea. She pivoted instead, choosing to make a zillion small incremental changes in more countries than ever visited by a US Secretary of State. Changes at the human level. As Stephanie McCrummen pointed out in the Washington Post; those choices include promoting a milk cooperative in Malawi and attending an environmental summit in Nuuk, Greenland. Unglamorous events in overlooked places.

"I'm very happy that my 100th country was Latvia," Hilary told students in Riga. The Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves, is an initiative she launched to get 100 million homes to use clean burning stoves, instead of toxic fires. It's reducing carbon, it's improving women's security, and it's saving millions of lives. No wonder her husband calls her 'a walking NGO.' Doable, sustainable, non-pompous, small steps; a woman's touch.

Swanee Hunt, Founding Director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School, compares Hilary's legacy with that of that Secretary of State George Marshall, who won the Noble Peace Prize for what came to be called 'The Marshall Plan,' aid to rebuild European economies and contain the spread of Soviet communism after World War 2. It was a new security paradigm; humanitarian, strategic, pragmatic. The Hilary doctrine is all that, and more. It establishes the empowering of women as a central force for a more stable world.

Will John Kerry sustain her vision? Does he grasp that, as the book "Sex and World Peace," empirically proves after a 12 year global study; the best predictor of a state's peacefulness is not what we've been told. Not wealth, not democracy, not natural resources, not geopolitical or ethno religious identity. The best predictor of a state's peacefulness is how well its women are treated.

Hilary has tried to establish continuity to women's centrality in foreign policy. She created the position of ambassador at large for global women issues. She saw to it that the President signed a memorandum making the post permanent. Last March, she issued a document titled; "Promoting Gender Equality to Achieve Our National Security and Foreign Policy Objectives." A dull, wonky name for a revolutionary manifesto. It makes mandatory, the US State Department's inclusion of women in everything from budget plans to peace negotiations.

Me, I think about reading her Wellesley commencement remarks written at age 21, they end with a commitment, "To practice with all the skill of our being, the art of making possible." For decades, she's been learning how. Take that well earned rest, my sister, but only for a while. Women are waiting and so is history.

Now to our first guest. Melissa Silverstein founded the now go to blog for all things feminist and movies. "Women in Hollywood,' it's called on indiewire.com. She is also a co-founder and the artistic director of the Athena Film Festival; a celebration of women and leadership at Barnard College in New York City. Taking place right now from February 7th to 10th, check out, all one word, athenafilmfestival.com.

Welcome Melissa to Women's Media Center live, it's good to have you with us.

Melissa:  Glad to be here.

Robin:  Now, I don't know where to start, but let's start with the Athena Film Festival which was your baby. You made it happen and it is now an established and huge thing. Talk about it, what it's doing this year.

Melissa:  Well, the Athena Film Festival is in its third year. I'm one of the co-founders with Kitty Kolbert who runs the Center for Leadership studies at Barnard College. The goal of the film festival is to highlight women's leadership both in the fictional world and in the real world. What we have put together is 36 movies, we have 11 documentaries, 10 features and 15 shorts, that all tell the story of women's leadership. What makes the Athena Film Festival unique is that have films directed by men and women, but at the core, at the center of each story is a woman leader.

Robin:  This is just, this is so special. I mean having attended it and come away feeling like I had entered into the future or entered into a really fair world. It's a cultural shock to come back to the now.

Melissa:  Well, we love it and we're really proud of it. One of the things that we do is we kick off the festival not with an opening film but with an awards reception, where we honor women in the entertainment business. This year we are honoring Gale Anne Hurd who is a long time producer who is kind of an outside, out of the box, typical female producer, produces action and genre film. With the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement award and ... Laura Ziskin was a producer in Hollywood who passed away last year.

Our other awardees include the fantastic Ava DuVernay, the director of "Middle of Nowhere," and Rose Kuo who runs the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Pat Mitchell, The Paley Center for Media, and Molly Haskell who wrote the landmark book "From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies."

Robin:  I always feel that you are the non-blood daughter, in terms of feminism and films of Molly Haskell.

Melissa:  I only could wish to aspire to be as thorough and thoughtful as Molly Haskell.

Robin:  Well, your new book, "In Her Voice: Women Directors Talk Directing," is a very important contribution on that front. Say, when it came out, it just newly out, right?

Melissa:  Well, yes. It's out two weeks now, my goal when I started the website 'Women in Hollywood,' which is ... I blog on the indiewire network, was to raise awareness of the great contributions women are making in the entertainment business and cover it kind of with a feminist lens. What I have discovered over the couple of years that I've been working on this site is; how we need to amplify women's voices, especially women directors. We live in a world where women are less than 10% of the top grossing directors. Really, they don't have enough of a voice and we don't get to see their visions out there. What I did was take 40 interviews, 40 plus interviews that had appeared on my site over the first couple of years and I put them together in an e-book. There is ... with each director, there is a bio, there are links to their trailers, links to their imdb site as well as the interview.

The objective of this is for people to go, "Oh yeah, there are a lot of women out there." You can download it very simply on ... go to inhervoice.net and it's two or three clicks and you have the book on your computer. You can read it on a PDS, you can also download it to all your readers and if you want to actually get a copy which you can get a copy, you have to get that through Amazon but then you can't see the hyperlinks.

Robin:  Oh, then you miss the hyperlink. This is very important, I mean not only because you know your way around social media and the net, but because Hollywood seems to have woken up to, "Oh, a woman director," so we give her the Oscar one year and then we only know that one.

Melissa:  There are no women nominated for best director this year.

Robin:  I see, so we're back to ...

Melissa:  We're back to nothing.

Robin:  We're back to nothing.

Melissa:  Only four women in what 76 years have been nominated and only one woman have won.

Robin:  The guy at Cannes, I remember said something like, "Well, we just can't ..." he "It was the film version of we just can't find qualified women."

Melissa:  Exactly! To build on that the Cannes piece is, I've been working with international UNIS film festivals, around the world through my work and through the work of the Athena Film Festival. This year for the first time, we're all getting together in Berlin and we're going to have a discussion on the status of women directors.

Robin:  That's fantastic, when is that take place?

Melissa:  That takes place February 15th at the Berlin Film Festival and I'm happy to get people who will be in Berlin to join with us.

Robin:  But, this is not ...

Melissa:  The objective of this is to really continue to raise awareness of the lack of gender parity. One of the things that I've learned from talking with women directors, and I focus on women directors because that is the most important, high-profile position in the industry.

Robin:  Yes.

Melissa:  That there is a sense that people do not trust women. They don't trust women to have big budgets, to be able to direct films with big budgets.

Robin:  It's a ...

Melissa:  They don't trust women experiences as films, that's why there are so many less films with women leads. There is a sense that women are less than and this can't continue in order for us to be able to see stories that are relevant to the entire world.

Robin:  Yes. Also the director is a command and control position. That's where the rubber meets the road.

Melissa:  Exactly, and it's the most visible position. When you see people talking about their movies, you see the director talking about the movie. You see the director talking about the vision. What's interesting in watching the kind of evolution of Kathryn Bigelow in this "Zero Dark Thirty" controversy is that at the beginning, a month ago, she was doing all these interviews with Mark Boal. Now, it shifted and she's doing a lot more on her own, commanding her vision.

Robin:  Uh huh.

Melissa:  I firmly believe a male director never would have been paired as much as the two of them were. Part of it is just the way that they've worked.

Robin:  Yes.

Melissa:  But part of it was her discomfort in these kinds of things and also her being a woman. I'm convinced.

Robin:  Yes. Well, it's been very exciting to see what you've done with women in film developed from an individual blog, Women in Hollywood, and commenting on what films actually were to women. How women were portrayed in what was good and bad in a different ... to this presence, as an artistic director of a festival, as a co-founder, active in the international film festivals and now a book author.

Melissa:  People can sign up for a weekly update of the films that are opening that are directed by women and that are women-centric up on the website, which you can see on indiewire ...

Robin:  But if they need to do a search, it's just Melissa Silverstein and women in Hollywood and they'll get there eventually.

Melissa:  Yes.

Robin:  Thank you again for being with us on Women's Media Center live. We'll pause briefly here at Women's Media Center live. I'm Robin Morgan and I will be back in just a minute, with the woman who keeps Sundance on its toes. Don't go away.

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Announcer:  You're listening to Women's Media Center live with Robin Morgan, on 1580 AM, a CBS station.

Robin:  We're back, with our next guest Keri Putnam. Executive director of the Sundance institute, which discovers, develops and supports filmmakers, presents the annual Sundance Film Festival and has just issued a blockbuster study on where women are in film.

Welcome Keri to Women's Media Center live.

Keri:  Thank you, it's great to be here.

Robin:  Well, it's lovely to have you here.

Bravo for this report; "Exploring the Barriers and Opportunities for Independent Women Filmmakers," which was commissioned by Sundance Institute and Women in Film, Los Angeles. With four wonderful researchers out of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. This is the first of its kind study, isn't it?

Keri:  It is. We were very interested at Sundance Institute because there have been some studies, notably by Martha Lauzen, about women representation behind the camera in the studio world. Those percentages have consistently been pretty ... dismal, actually.

We were curious at Sundance about how women were faring in the independent world. I mean we have some interesting space on our own numbers at the festival and in our developmental programs but we really wanted to take a comprehensive look at the field, which had never been done before and theorize that perhaps in independent film there were fewer gatekeepers and therefore potentially fewer barriers to success behind the camera. We're curious insofar as the representation was, and equal what some of those obstacles were and what the opportunities were for us to create programmatic activity to support women.

We were very pleased and thrilled to be working with Stacy Smith and her team at USC Annenberg. She is one of the leading experts on diversity and media, specifically on gender and media. I think the study has yielded a lot of very productive and sort of useful data that we'll take forward from here. We do know that women are doing far better in independent film than they are in the studio world, the mainstream studio world. For example, at the Sundance Film Festival over the past 10 years, from 2002 to 2012, nearly 30% of the filmmakers ... and by that we mean directors, writers, producers, cinematographers and editors were female.

Robin:  Aha!

Keri:  That compares to statistics hovering around the 5% range in the feature world.

Robin:  Huh!

Keri:  Across all the categories, we really are faring better in the independent film world but as you drill into the data you begin to see, not only we're not a parity but there are some significant less in the set we can draw from where the obstacles start to appear.

Robin:  Yes. Stacy sent an email right now that I'm looking at right now where she herself, your chief researcher said a couple of especially compelling findings; women are supporting women behind the camera. I guess this is mostly in the independent world. Two, Sundance supplies and reinforces the pipeline of women directors from independent films to studio films.

Keri:  It is extraordinary, that was in statistics we certainly didn't go looking for but we were pleased to find. I think this would ...

Robin:  You should be.

Keri:  ... certainly apply to Sundance Institute and probably to many of the other not for profit organizations that support new filmmakers. Over the 1,100 top grossing movies of the past 10 years, 41.5% of the female directors that contributed to those movies had been supported by Sundance Institute in the past. Speaks to the needs for emerging filmmakers of diverse backgrounds and genders to be supported early in their careers and be given mentorship and a pipeline ... to getting their work seen.

Robin:  Yes, the pipeline is all important. She also said, Stacy also said, "As commerce moves into the film space, females move out." That's interesting.

Keri:  Yes, and that was probably the most disturbing, perhaps not the most surprising but certainly the most disturbing clear finding in the study, where we looked at the percentage of women that were coming in, let's say with scripts to our labs. We saw that we were nearly at gender parity in many cases, certainly in documentaries. Even in feature film we were approaching gender parity in our labs. But when it came to ... in the competition for feature films, which tends to be first time films from directors. We saw in a narrative competition a drop off from our developmental programs, I think that was about 16.9% over the past 10 years in narrative films.

Robin:  Wow.

Keri:  But interestingly women were 34% of directors in documentary films, so we can come back to that why is it more easy, why is it easier for women to become directors and filmmakers of documentaries and narratives.

Robin:  Indeed.

Keri:  But as the sort of level of production finance and the level of cast and the level of mainstream financing involvement increased, for example, in our premier section of the festival we saw that percentage drop off both in documentaries and in narratives. Indeed, if you sort of trace the line from first films with Sundance to second or third films through to studio films, you do see a steep drop off of women as budgets get higher and the casts are more high profile. I think that's ... that Stacy refers to that as the fiscal cliffs, which I think is a great term and a useful one and something that we'll be looking closely at trying to find program to help address in the coming years at Sundance.

Robin:  Keri, I have to say that the two things that most impressed me about the study, and by the way, the study can be downloaded both from the Sundance institute website and the Women and Film website.

Keri:  That's right.

Robin:  Please get it. Get it and read the whole thing because it will make your hair curl if it's straight and straighten it if it's curly. But the two things that impressed me the most were that you ... sort of take away. Identified five major areas identified as hampering women's career development in film, and then went into opportunities that exist and that Sundance was committed to doing to change the situation. You want to go into those?

Keri:  Absolutely, they include, as I mentioned earlier with the fiscal cliffs, gender and financial barriers, where women just have harder time accessing financing, also male dominated industry networking which is sort of a similar ... aspect of the same problem, and stereotyping on set. Interestingly, work - family balance was not the first, second or third mentioned ...

Robin:  Of course.

Keri:  ... reason why women are not reaching parity. We thought that was sort of important, because a lot of people may assume that is the primary issue but we didn't find it to be so. But it was also important for us, at Sundance when I take for women in film as well, to not just focus barriers but really look at the opportunities. Look at what works, look what can guide us to creating programmatic activity going forward that will help we hope familiarize these challenges. That includes mentoring and as I mentioned earlier, early support for women as they're emerging in their careers through the sorts of programs Sundance offers at its labs and granting program.

Also, improved access to finance across the board. We don't finance production here at Sundance, we do offer grants, but we do ... we do work with a lot of allied organizations that are stepping into the finance space. We're hoping to be creating some partnership to create opportunities for women directed and women produced films to find new sources of financing.

The third key opportunity was ... in part, what we're doing here today, which is raising awareness of this challenge. I think many people may not be aware of this disparity that exist, but I think in a world where the stories that we hear in the media, not just on film but on television and on the internet. The stories that we hear really shape our culture and shape our perception of ourselves and one another, to have this sort of disparity we think does nobody any good. It's better to have the full range of voices telling the stories that we all share.

Robin:  The Women's Media Center's mission is to make women visible and powerful in the media, and I must say that I congratulate Sundance and women in film because this report goes a long way toward helping do that. Be sure to download it from Women and Film website and from Sundance Institute. Thank you Keri, for being with us today.

Keri:  Thank you so much, it's really been a pleasure.

Robin:  This week we have some news you can use. Two little items; One, right around and during Oscar night, Women's Media Center has a setup a hashtag, so that you can hear, find out and contribute to all sorts of insights about women and Oscars and film. It's simply #oscarwomen. Join us during Oscar night and just before and around that time.

The other little item is St. Valentine's Day is coming up. If you're into that sort of thing, here's a way to make it revolutionary. Information on marriage equality. If you and your same sex lover want to become legalized, nine states have the freedom to marry for same sex couples. They are; Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Washington State and Vermont. Plus Washington DC.

In 2012, the legislature in New Jersey passed a freedom to marry bill and work is, even as we speak, underway to override the Governor's veto (hiss boo), but they're overriding it.

New Mexico and Rhode Island explicitly respect out of state marriages of same sex couples, they don't have their own but they respect it.

Well, nine states now offer broad protection short of marriage; Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey and Rhode Island allow civil union, while California, Oregon and New York offer broad domestic partnership, there's a lot of options there. Happy Valentine's Day.

Now, it's break time. This is Women's Media Center live and so far I'm still Robin Morgan. We'll return shortly with the politics of Hollywood and a simply great actor, Kathy Bates.

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Announcer:  You're listening to Women's Media Center live with Robin Morgan, on 1580 AM, a CBS station.

Robin:  Welcome back. While we greet Kathy Bates, who has been nominated for numerous Oscars, Tonys, Golden Globes and eight times the Emmy, and who was the winner of an Emmy, a Golden Globe and the Academy Award for best actress. She is also that rarity, a great character actor who is a star to and an award winning director too.

Welcome Kathy Bates to Women's Media Center live. It's an honor to have you here.

Kathy:  Thank you Robin.

Robin:  I have to start by just thanking you for artistry over the years. It's not a big surprise that you have an Oscar and an Emmy and a SAG award and a Golden Globe and a Tony, I got to see you in "Night Mother," on Broadway and was destroyed by it. It was an amazing performance.

Kathy:  Oh thank you. I'm very ... that play will always a beacon for me. I was so grateful to have been a part of that experience. I wish I could claim that I won the Tony Award for it, but Anne and I were both nominated for the Tony and Jessica Tandy took it that year for "Foxfire." But we were both so excited to be part of The Tony Award that year. I'm talking of course about Anne Pitoniak who was in the play with me ...

Robin:  Yes, both of you were brilliant.

Kathy:  It was a magnificent experience for both of us.

Robin:  Well, you can tell that in my memory, you won the Tony. You were crowned in actress heaven. How are we doing, we women, these days in the power structure of Hollywood, which like most others is pretty much pale male, as actors, in particular as older women actors. Also, as directors because you are both.

Kathy:  I'm more excited nowadays than I was then about, certainly the role for women. I've been watching young actress come up like Jessica Chastain. I see actress that are passionate about their craft again. I think we went through a period where actress were feeling that there was no need to study or ... or really work at a craft. It was about being a success and about making money. It was about limousines and dresses and all kinds of other things that really don't have anything to do with the craft itself.

Robin:  Yes.

Kathy:  It seemed like we went through a bit of a period there where ... there was a large number of people in the press and in the media who were spoken about as being actors, when really they weren't actors. They were models or singers or whatever.

But I'm happy to see there's so many wonderful women actors who stayed at it. Annette Bening for example, I think it's getting better. I think it's still pretty pale male when it comes to directors, unfortunately. I see very few, of course there's Kathryn Bigelow, who's really stepped up there and does the kind of hard ... films that ... we've seen other men ... do over the years. That's kind of hard, about fighting, about war, about those kinds of subjects. About male bonding and we don't see that much in a lot of the young female directors, I think that are coming up now necessarily.

Robin:  Right. It'll be interesting when we someday win an Oscar for a female director who actually can do a film about female bonding and still win the Oscar for it, instead of ... you know what I mean.

Kathy:  Yes I do. I think there's still a gender divide in this country, if you will, at just so much of the areas. I think usually civil war in politics, I think there are a lot of divides right now that are keeping us from understanding one another and emphasizing. Certainly with the NRA and the gun battle now, I think there's a big divide in this country about that. What I really wish is that we could go back to school all of us and educate each other in a way that emphasizing. I think that would really be the key. It's not about the guns, it's not about the weapons. I think it's about the hate.

Robin:  I think you're right.

Kathy:  I still feel that a lot ... I feel some divisiveness, I wouldn't say necessarily in Hollywood. But I do feel that there's a lot of divisiveness when it comes to women and gender, certainly globally. The news out of India recently it's been shocking and a wakeup call for all of us.

Robin:  Yes. On our recent ...

Kathy:  All of these things, I think occupied my mind more than the movies. I do feel that it's tough for women and I think ... even our President said in his inaugural address that it's time for women and our daughters and our ... to receive equal pay for equal efforts. That here we are in the beginning of the 21st century ....

Robin:  Having to say that ... that's right, having to say that.

Kathy:  It hasn't happened. I don't know that it's fair in Hollywood, I don't have the chance to look at the books, but I know in my own experience I've had cases where even though I was playing the lead in a film, someone else got the money. I don't know why that happens and it's not fair. We have to change the culture.

I think even for ... you see it's not just Hollywood, it's not just the gun debate, it's not just these different issues and different ... drawers that we put things in. We really have to educate. I feel instead of putting arm guards at schools, we need to put people in schools who can teach kids to emphatise.

Robin:  Yes.

Kathy:  Teach kids not to bully and teach kids to appreciate each other's gender and to ... for there to be a real democracy in this world.

Robin:  Yes.

Kathy:  Then there won't be any need for, I mean I remember ... I had the honor of meeting Gloria Steinem at my alma mater many years ago and I gave the speech for the graduates there. She ... I talked about walking in other people shoes, that's what I did for a living. That's what you have to find out when you're an actor, you have to; what is it like to walk in somebody else's shoes? She said it was subversive.

Robin:  That's right.

Kathy:  Why is it a subversive, you say that,  because if you can emphatise with someone else, then you can't, it's not so easy to kill them.

Robin:  That's right. It's not possible in fact. Yes.

Kathy:  It's not possible. I think that's one of the gift that women can bring to the culture. A global culture, a democratic culture. That can help with so many issues, even besides Hollywood and ... See I've always felt in Hollywood that we reflect society. We reflect what's going on in the world.

Robin:  You influenced it too. You influenced it greatly as well and that's incredibly important. The old thing," If you judge somebody by the choices that they've made," and I looked at the choices that you've made in your roles whether as a star or a character actor. They all, in some way or another, really resonate with that message. They seriously do. I don't know if you know, but Gloria together with Jane Fonda and me are the three co-founders of the Women's Media Center. One of the reasons, well the primary reason is to get out that message that you've just articulated. To change the media so it reflects the real democracy and promulgates it. Because that, we're up a tree or up the creek without a paddle.

Kathy:  Yes. I commend you on the work that you're doing there and I've spoken to Jane recently about it. One of the programs that you have that I'm very interested in is one where you teach women to speak well when they're in these situations like myself, to be able to articulate and to be good speakers when they're talking about their particular field. To be trained to do that and I think that's a wonderful opportunity for so many women, because I think many women, I think we all ... I think many women need to still find their voices. I count myself among them even though I play characters. When it comes to just being myself, I need to be able to speak about my feelings and be clear about my thoughts. I think it's a wonderful program that you have.

Robin:  We've progressive women's voices. We found that even the most incredibly articulate woman about, maybe their own field, when they turn to trying to articulate their passionate political feelings or societal feelings. I don't mean electoral political necessarily, are intimidated because we're made to feel that we're not experts. I don't think you have to worry about that, but I'm glad you think the program is important. We're very proud of progressive women's voices.

I'm very proud that you spent time here with us on Women's Media Center live, it was a real honor. I look forward to many years more of extraordinary performances from you. Any help that we at Women's Media Center can be to you in any way, you know who to call.

Kathy:  Thank you so much Robin, it's been a pleasure speaking with you this morning. Keep up the good work you're doing and please let me know if there's anything more I can do for you.

Robin:  Thank you so much.

Now we have to enter the surrealism corner. This is where I always want to sing, "Dada dada dada dada," but today in the surrealism corner, what we're looking at is actually real. It's science.

Did you know that men's eyes are more sensitive to small details and moving objects while women are more perceptive ... excuse me, to color changes. This is a new study that suggest that men and women actually do see things differently. There are marked sex differences in vision between men and women, this is a study out of the City University of New York.

A recent large review of the literature concluded that in most cases, females also have better sensitivity and discriminate and categorized odors better than males. This means we can smell a rat when there's a rat around. Previous research had found that we focus differently too. An experiment at the University of Southern California; researchers found that men are more likely to fixate on the mouth of a person in conversation and also are more likely to be distracted by movement behind that person. While women, tend to shift our gaze between the speakers eyes and body, we watch for body language too, and the eyes. We're more likely to be distracted by other people, researchers found.

That's your bottom line. We've suspected it; men and women do indeed see things differently. Dada dada.

Time for another pause, I'm Robin Morgan here with Women's Media Center live, seeing things differently. When we come back, Jane Fonda has the statistics on Hollywood patriarchy and she's ready to share.

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Robin:  We are back again. This time with my sister co-founder of the Women's Media Center. Actor, producer, activist, fitness guru, author and all around wonder woman. I’ve got to get her those magic bracelets and that see through airplane. Jane Fonda.

Welcome back Jane, to Women's Media center live, very good to have you back again.

Jane:  Well thank you for having me back, Robin. I love being on your show. This time we're going to talk about women in movies and film.

Robin:  We are, because it's the Oscar season and this is our show on everything from the Athena Film Festival to Sundance to ...

Jane:  Sundance ...

Robin:  ... to Hollywood.

Jane:  Where this year half of the directors were women.

Robin:  Yes.

Jane:  Which is very exciting.

Robin:  Yes. But what's it looking like in the center of the world, otherwise known as Hollywood?

Jane:  Well, as the film scholar Ruby Rich has written in an article for the UK Guardian, you see central women today directing films is like playing against the house in a Vegas casino; the odds suck and the game is rigged.

Robin:  Oh ...

Jane:  I mean Hollywood is a tough nut for women. There's been some improvement this year over last year. Women directed 9% of the top 250 domestic grossing films, which is up from 5% the year before. There's a 4% rise.

Robin:  Yes.

Jane:  But increasingly, women are directing and writing and editing and shooting documentary films ...

Robin:  That's where our numbers have really gone up.

Jane:  That's where our numbers have gone up; 39% of documentaries at all the high profile film festivals last year were directed by women, that's up considerably. But the playing field isn't level. There's a bias against women's abilities and bankability. It has absolutely nothing to do with talent. It's not the studios only hire men for their big films because men are more experienced. "Men have made these big films before so we'll hire them again," but that's not true. Plenty male directors with only one low budget film under their belts have been hired to direct big budget franchise films. Marc Webb, who made this tiny little film, I don't know if you saw it, it was a sweet film, "(500) Days of Summer."

Robin:  I have no idea ...

Jane:  They gave him a $ 230 million film of Amazing Spiderman to direct.

Robin:  I see.

Jane:  Or Carl Rinsch who has, he'd only done one short film. He'd never even done a feature. He got to direct $ 170 million film "47 Ronin." Another guy, Rupert Sanders, directed "Snow White and the Huntsman," and he'd had absolutely no prior feature experience. It's ...

Robin:  It's not experience.

Jane:  It's not experience.

Robin:  Well, perhaps it's that the director's chair is perceived as a place of command and control.

Jane:  They hire ... the familiar gender.

Robin:  Yes.

Jane:  Regardless of what the experience has been.

Robin:  How do we get into the pipeline? What happens when we graduate, say , from film school?

Jane:  Well, Teri Schwartz is on the board of the Women's Media Center, she's had ... she's the President of UCLA.

Robin:  Right.

Jane:  Film school. It's a very prestigious film school, and she said, that when they, and it's a coed school, and the men and women graduate, the men get agents and managers immediately and the women don't. It's starts right at the beginning.

Robin:  Yes. If we can't even get in the pipeline to get the experience than how come we're criticized for not having the experience. It's tautological.

Jane:  Yes. It's catch 22.

Robin:  Yes.

Jane:  The fact is that making short films and making documentaries does not become a pipeline for women to then rise up to the bigger ... to the bigger studio features.

Robin:  It's in danger of becoming a ghetto in fact at this rate.

Jane:  Yes. They only take gambles with people who look like the majority of those already directing studio features.

Robin:  What about ...

Jane:  We have to have a whole attitude change out here. It's important because ... I mean films are such a central part of our culture. I mean ... films do so much for creating consciousness and awareness of ourselves and the society that we live in. What happens is that the point of view in this major facet of culture is all from the man’s point of view.

Robin:  Yes, and it not only ... I mean, films reflect but they also define reality. Not just our culture anymore but the whole world. I don't think that we can underestimate the enormity of this as, frankly, propaganda. You are the most principled member of the Academy that I have ever encountered. I know that you dutifully make a point of seeing every single film that's nominated. Which I think is amazing, amazingly admirable. You take it very very seriously. Is there anything in particular that you can recommend this year that you found ... either showed women in some actual light or just was a damn good film.

Jane:  Well there's so many good films this year. I mean one of my favorites was "Beasts of the Southern Wild."

Robin:  Uh huh.

Jane: It's just ... hauntingly, beautiful and original. It's like a fable. The central female character at the time was six and she's nominated for an Oscar.

Robin:  Yes. That's wonderful.

Jane:  Beautiful film. I think "Silver Linings Playbook" is a fantastic film. Jennifer Lawrence is the real deal. I mean she is a force, she is so ... embodied. She's so present as an actor. She was nominated a couple years ago for "Winter's Bone," I mean she's very young, she's 22 years old.

Robin:  Yes.

Jane:  She started in "Hunger Games," but she's wonderful in Silver Linings Playbook. I love Django.

Robin:  Ah.

Jane:  "Django Unchained," have you seen it?

Robin:  No, I haven't. I have resistance going I must say to that much violence. I loved early ... Tarantino. But some of the later ones have been a turn off, but I should see it because ...

Jane:  Just because it's fantastic. It's a visceral experience of slavery, done in the context of the Spaghetti Western, so there's humor. But it's operatic, it's over the top, it's exaggerated, everything is ... the blood and the gore, it's all exaggerated. But people are coming out of that theater saying, "Oh my God, I never realized that slavery was that bad."

It's a real ... it's a visceral lesson in slavery. In the same cineplex you can go see "Lincoln," which is a head trip.

Robin:  Yes.

Jane:  A history lesson of how government works. It's also a very good film. But the two, the fact that these two films are playing together at the same time is really ... I think, really interesting.

Robin:  It's quite a double blow.

Jane:  To go back to the women as directors, there have been a lot of really really successful movies directed by women; Hurt Locker, When Harry Met Sally, Mamma Mia, Bridesmaid, Lost in Translation, Zero Dark Thirty, It's Complicated, the animated film Brave.

These are all done by women. Women are perfectly capable of making extremely successful ...

Robin:  Of course.

Jane:  ... and large movies. But they're, it's just too rare. We have to keep talking about it. Where are the women? Why aren't there more women? Why can't we do something about it?

Jane:  Is it ... hard to raise money?

Jane:  I don't think we can force Hollywood to do quotas or anything like that, but ...

Robin:  What do you think it is? Is it that we need more women producers to hire women? Is it that we need more women investors to say, "I want a women investor?" I mean, "I want a women director."

Jane:  We need financial institutions that are willing to back women starting their own media companies. We need women in decision making positions who can, they can green light movies and they don't depend on the man upstairs.

Robin:  Right.

Jane:  To green light their movies. Women and leadership, it's always comes back to that in every business sector whether it's movies or ... financial or whatever it is we need women in decision making positions that can say, "Yes, you're a woman and I'm going to give you a $ 200 million film to direct."

Robin:  Yes. We've only got a few seconds left but say a little bit because I know people will always want to know what's happening with Jane Fonda.

You're in the Sorkin series still? In "Newsroom?"

Jane:  Yes, we just shot an episode for the new season. I played Matthew Reagan as a cameo in a film called "The Butler," speaking about movies about race it's a very beautiful beautiful movie that'll come out in a year. Well, it'll come out next fall I think. It's a true story about a boy who grew up on slave plantation and ended up being a butler in the White House, starting with the Truman administration all the way through the Reagan administration. Forest Whitaker played the butler and Oprah plays his wife. A lot of stars play the First Ladies and Presidents. I played Nancy and it was a lot of fun. I'm told, in spite of our differences, that she was very happy that I played her.

Robin: I 'm sure it's one of the high points of her life.

Thanks for your take on Hollywood and women. Thanks for being on Women's Media Center live.

Now it's time for fighting words.

Sometimes, the morning newspaper can make your teeth grind with one article, yet somehow give you hope with another. Well a recent New York Times roller coaster ride left me with sociopolitical whiplash.

Item number one; was that the Indian government is approving new legislation on sexual violence against women. Although it has to be ratified by parliament within six months, the law takes effect immediately. You see, politicians are scurrying in response to nationwide street protest about police and government incompetence in sexual assault cases. Triggered by the recent New Delhi gang rape that resulted in a young woman's death.

The new law makes punishable as crimes the following; voyeurism, stalking, acid attacks and trafficking of women. It has provisions requiring female officers be present in interviewing survivors and it mandates punishment ranging from seven years in prison to the death penalty in cases where the victim dies or is left in a vegetative state.

Indian feminist groups are urging the President not to sign this, "Piecemeal and fragmented," law. That's what they called it. Which was rushed into passage they say to mullify public outrage, not to have a serious impact. Glaring omissions include a lack of ... for marital rape and no prosecution of military personnel who commits sexual assaults. Many women's advocate also objected to the introduction of the death penalty.

I sympathize with Indian feminist who are unsatisfied by so little, so late. But it's true that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Of course, it's also true that the bad is the enemy of the good. Protection is some of rapist who are husbands and/or military personnel is frankly, appalling, so is the minimalism with which the law addresses police behavior. Sometimes even police rape in the police station, which re-victimizes the survivor when she seeks help. Which, consequently, fewer and fewer women do.

The Delhi based lawyer's collective, found evidence of judicial bias against women in domestic violence in sexual assault cases and recommended an official mechanism to monitor the judiciaries’ performance. Is that in the new law? Forget about it. Only now is India seriously addressing acid attacks and trafficking? Pause for sound effects of grinding teeth [sound effects].

Then there's item number two; an article about how librarians, Muslim scholars, at archivist and most movingly, ordinary citizens in Timbuktu had hidden ancient scrolls from the Islamists when they came marauding across Mali, chopping off the hands of accused thieves, stoning rape survivors, calling them adulteresses, banning music, destroying the long held sacred tombs of Sufi mystics and saints and burning the famous Library of Timbuktu. But the ancient scrolls from the city's golden age were saved. Text on Islamic philosophy, on astronomy, on botany, medicine, poetry, 8,000 scrolls kept by one family alone, handed down generation after generation. They'd all already been hidden.

Residents of Timbuktu have been through this before many times from when Songhai Emperors invaded Mali to when France colonized it. Unable to save themselves from the sadistic so called 'justice' of mutilation or stoning, these people managed to save artifacts of learning. How fanatics fear education. How they cherished their ignorance. The Islamists yahoos are like the Old Testament's Yahweh, forbidding the tree of knowledge and wrathful at any disobedience. Well, they're gone from Timbuktu for now and the scrolls are safe.

Of course, if we could only convince Indian politicians to understand that female human beings are at least as indispensable as Timbuktuans understand their trove of human knowledges, that would be nice.

That's it for this week. You've been listening to us on CBS station 1580 AM Radio in Washington DC. Or you've been streaming us on the web at wmclive.com. Which also has podcasts of previous shows. Remember to email us at womensmediacenterlive@gmail.com. Or tweet us at #wmclive. Portions of this program were taped earlier. Views expressed here do not represent the WMC.

Here is the family for Women's Media Center live; WMC producer and for this program executive producer, Julie Burton. Senior producer Cristal Williams Chancellor. Technical director Michelle Kinsey Bruns. Production Assistant Nora Eakin, and our founding sponsor Regina Kulik Scully. I'm Robin Morgan. Thanks for being with us.

Join us next week when we'll continue to celebrate Black History Month. What is that, one month out of a pale male year? Anyway, we'll celebrate with a stellar quartet of talent and intellect. Barbara Smith, Salamishah Tillet, Bonnie Thornton Dill and Johnnetta Cole. Only here on Women's Media Center live.

Announcer: You're listening to Women's Media Center live with Robin Morgan, on 1580 AM, a CBS station.

What is a radio host’s responsibility when their guest crosses a line? More to the point, what should a radio host do when their guest suddenly calls a U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz a “seditious whore?” Should they remark that the comment is out of line or should they essentially ignore it and move on?

The latter is what happened on Voice of Russia American Edition on Monday, January 29. (Voice of Russia, is heard on AM 1390 Washington, DC; AM 1430 New York City; and 99.9 HD-2 Miami, FL).

Host Rob Sachs had on Andrew Auernheimer, an internet “hacktivist” to discuss the suicide of Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit and co-creator of RSS, who had been charged by the federal government for unauthorized downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR, in what many believed constituted a case of overzealous prosecution by Ortiz.

Auernheimer said on the program (at the 4:25 mark):

I think it’s quite ironic that [Carmen] Ortiz, who tried to steal a man’s motel business because she thought he was weak, has comments like that to make about respect for property. I think she’s a seditious whore.

To which Host Rob Sachs merely stammered: “Okay. Well, getting…apart from that…”

We’re not unsympathetic to those that believe the government’s treatment of Swartz was wrong. But, regardless of those strong feelings, using certain epithets, like whore, hurts of the standing of all women.

A radio host has a responsibility when a guest crosses the line. The correct and proper response is to call attention to the unfair term.  The host doesn't have to "win the point" by engaging in a debate of whether that’s acceptable, but they certainly must not let it stand.

Sachs could have said, "I'm surprised to hear you say that."  Or even "I don't know how to respond," or  "I'm speechless at that."

Sachs fell down on the job by glossing over the gross insult. It's no different than hearing any truly off-color statement from a guest where he might say, "I don't agree,” or “I don't think that's true.” He shouldn’t have let Auernheimer’s comment slide by without an appropriate reaction.

We understand that any program host might be surprised by what their guests say. But part of being a host is being able to react, and interact, with their guests. Being caught off guard isn’t an excuse for failing to react when a guest crosses a line.

The nominees for the 85th Academy Awards are out this morning and once again it’s women who’ve been left out of the picture.

Across 19 categories 140 men were nominated for awards versus 35 women.**  This year there are no female nominees for Directing, Cinematography, Film Editing, Writing (Original Screenplay) or Music (Original Score). The single woman nominated for a writing award, for best adapted screenplay, is Lucy Alibar for Beasts of the Southern Wild, who shares credit with Benhn Zeitlin (who’s also been nominated for Best Director). 

Awards nominees provide a “snapshot” of the film industry, and the image that emerges is one where men fill all of the top roles, and most of the other positions as well. Click here to compare how the ratios stacked up last year.

Academy Award Categories with No Women Nominated*

Directing (Number of Men Nominated: 5)
Number of women nominated last year: 0

Cinematography (Number of Men Nominated: 5)
Number of women nominated last year: 0

Writing, original screenplay (Number of Men Nominated: 5)
Number of women nominated last year: 2

Film Editing (Number of Men Nominated: 7)
Number of women nominated last year: 2

Music, original score (Number of Men Nominated: 5
Number of women nominated last year: 0

Visual Effects (Number of Men Nominated: 20)
Number of women nominated last year: 0

Sound Mixing (Number of Men Nominated: 15)
Number of women nominated last year: 1

Academy Award Categories with Exactly 1 Woman Nominated

Writing, adapted screenplay (Number of Men Nominated: 5)
Number of women nominated last year: 1

Animated Feature Film (Number of Men Nominated: 6)
Number of women nominated last year: 1

Sound Editing (Number of Men Nominated: 7)
Number of women nominated last year: 1

Short Film, live action (Number of Men Nominated: 7)
Number of women nominated last year: 2

Short Film, animated (Number of Men Nominated: 4)
Number of women nominated last year: 3

Academy Award Categories with 2 or More Women Nominated

Best Picture: 8 women nominated, 16 men
Documentary, short subject: 5 women nominated, 5 men
Documentary, feature: 3 women nominated, 8 men
Makeup & Hairstyling: 3 women nominated, 5 men
Production Design: 5 women nominated, 6 men
Music, original song: 2 women nominated, 8 men
Costume Design: 4 women nominated, 1 man

*As of 1 pm 1/10/13 under some categories the Academy Awards currently list TBA under the names nominated. This is why the nominees for Documentary Feature are not listed at this time. We will update the figures when the Academy Awards releases the names for that category. Numbers reflect all people mentioned in nomination, including multiple names for same film.

** Updated 1/30/13 to include figures for Documentary Feature.

Just prior to her arrest, Eltahawy had given an exclusive interview to Women’s Center Media Live with Robin Morgan, where she spoke with Morgan about anti-Muslim sentiment, extremists on both sides fueling hate and inciting each other, and the fight for freedom by women and youth in the Middle East. The show aired Sunday, September 23. We are making available Mona's interview as a standalone download; its transcript is below.

Robin Morgan: Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-American feminist, brilliant journalist and pal. She was a correspondent for Reuters in Cairo and Jerusalem. She has reported news from the Middle East for The Guardian in the UK. She has written for US News and World Report. She writes essays and op-eds for publications around the world on Egypt and the region and the Islamic world and a particular focus on women’s status. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and lots of really highly respectable wonderful journalistic places. She is a force majeure and she is here with me today fresh from the plane landing from Cairo. Are your jets still lagging?

Mona Eltahawy: Very much so.

Robin: Yes, I nabbed her because she’s just back from Cairo where you were for, what, two, three months?

Mona: No, I was in Cairo for almost a month.

Robin: To your friends it seems much longer.

Mona: [laughs] I’ve been back and forth, though, so it’s been a bit.

Robin: So you were there when all the latest exploded. I know you went there to work with the women’s groups in the post-uprising. Tell what you’ve been doing.

Mona: I’ve been going back for various reasons. I’ve been going back for personal reasons because I wanted to show the military which was behind an attack on me in November that I would not be deterred from coming back to my country of birth. I wanted to go back to work with feminist groups on the ground there because I’m soon launching a national campaign against sexual violence. And I’m also gearing up to write a book on an essay I wrote about the relation of women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa.

Robin: Don’t do only one thing at a time, Mona. You are the original multitasker.

Mona: I try my best, Robin.

Robin: Yeah, you succeed. When things exploded over this asinine video that these troublemaking crazy Christians did in California, I think. How did impact on women, were women involved? What’s going down in terms of that?

Mona: What you saw in Cairo was clearly a right wing responding to a right wing. And a very fringe right wing on both sides.

Robin: Interesting.

Mona: And whenever two right wing fringes respond and especially if they are religiously motivated in any shape or form, women are never part of the equation. It’s usually an alarm bell to women and those of us who care about liberties generally. Especially for those of us who identify as feminists because when I look at the right wing groups in Egypt responding to this unbelievably amateurish film that had been on YouTube for at least two months, I think it was?

Robin: Yes!

Mona: And it was just picked up in time for a protest again, nicely timed to the September 11^th anniversary.

Robin: Oh how convenient!

Mona: Yes, exactly. Outside the US embassy which had nothing to do with the film. You recognize that it’s two very fringe right wings talking to each other above the heads of the rest of us. And wanting to hijack a very, very sensitive and special moment in time called our revolution.

Robin: You know, my PQ is very high, my paranoid quotient, and I did have this fantasy that the generals and even the Muslim Brotherhood, in other words the right wing in Egypt, were in some kind of crazy conspiracy with the crazy Christians who made the video. They supply each other with the flint to strike the flame. And the folks in the middle who are trying for democracy for equality, for sanity are the losers.

Mona: Absolutely, Robin. You know I’m not a great conspiracy theorist myself.

Robin: Nor am I, usually!

Mona: But there are moments where you really have to wonder who is benefitting from this and who is behind this. There were so many unanswered questions as we watched these events unfold. Not just in Egypt but in Libya, where the Ambassador and three staffers were killed. And then three days when fourteen Muslims were killed in clashes with fellow Muslims over this ridiculous film that no one would have watched unless the right wing groups managed to provoke each other.

Robin: Yes.

Mona: And then in Egypt, not just in Egypt, in all the countries where we’re having revolutions that continue because none of them really been completed yet. We’ve spent almost two years trying to change the stereotype of us as crazies, as angry, irrational people. And I think we’ve managed to succeed because we point to revolutions and say, “Look, you see, we chose the peaceful way, we didn’t choose the Al Qaeda way.”

Robin: That’s right.

Mona: And look who steps into this? The Al Qaeda types to say, “Here we are now.” And so all this work of almost two or three years, in three or four days was almost ruined. In Egypt when we’re discussing a constitution, and we have really right wing and rabidly anti-women and rabidly anti-freedom men writing a constitution it’s a very sensitive time and also we don’t want the return of emergency law. But when you see this chaos outside the American embassy, of course you begin to hear our justice minister who was at one time a respected judge talk about the possible resumption of emergency law. So again it’s only the right wing that benefits.

Robin: You said to me when you just arrived that you are tired of being a “cleaner” and that the crazies undo all the work that you and people like you have done to bust up the stereotypes of Muslims and the Muslim world. Do you know about the campaign on Twitter, which I think is witty and absolutely wonderful. Clearly it’s spontaneous and young people…the hash tag is #muslimrage.

Mona: Yes I saw that, in response to the crazy Newsweek cover.

Robin: It’s so witty! A tweet will be: “Took my laundry to the laundromat, #muslimrage.” “My mother got furious with me because I ate the top of the cupcake off #muslimrage.” [Mona laughs] It’s an ongoing campaign of, hello, we’re human, we’re normal, we’re like you, dare you recognize our humanity. And it’s all under #muslimrage.

Mona: Absolutely. This is what the revolutions were all about. Watching men and women and children in many cases to join them in public squares and public areas and spaces where they had been denied the ability to express anything. Telling their regimes and any allies who supported these regimes against our freedoms that we too deserve these freedoms. In the space of three or four days you have these people who had nothing to do with the revolution whose space was opened up by our revolution.

Robin: Coopting it.

Mona: Exactly. And wanting to derail it. And so those of us who have worked so hard, especially those of us who move between these various worlds, those of us who move between the so-called east and the so-called west (which I don’t believe exist)

Robin: [laughs] I don’t either.

Mona: Those of us who move between say the US and Egypt or the Middle East and North Africa who for such a long time have been saying, “We’re the ones who will bring about freedom and change, not Al Qaeda and not Osama bin Laden, not the violent types,” we’re the cleaners. We’re like the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction, where after someone is gruesomely murdered, Harvey Keitel’s character steps in to cleanup. I’ve gotten to this stage, and you know we do this and I go on various TV and radio stations and I’m happy to do it because I care deeply about these revolutions.

Robin: Of course.

Mona: I go on and I do this, “The revolution is about us, the revolution is not about the right wing in the US or about the right wing in the Middle East or North Africa.” And the very next day I am cursed and called a disgrace to Islam by the right wing or am called a crazy jihadi by the right wing in the US. So I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

Robin: Of course you are.

Mona: But I’ll be damned if any of them silence me. Or try to silence me because these revolutions will not be derailed by people who care nothing for freedom. We will win, not them.

Robin: You’re going to outlast them, for one thing. And besides you have the virtue of having truth on your side as well as the thirst for something better, the real hunger.

Mona: Absolutely.

Robin: I was having this argument with someone the other day about, “why are Muslims so easily insulted.” And I didn’t know quite where to begin but I came across an extremely good list which is just a little beginning of a list but well, in recent years, you know, just:

-The invasion of Iraq, as discredited pretext

-The images of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison

-The burning and desecration of the Qur’an by troops in Afghanistan and a pastor in Florida

-Detentions without trial in Guantanamo Bay

-The denial of visas to Muslim intellectuals

-The deaths of Muslim civilians as collateral damage in drone strikes

-Even political campaigns against the specter of Islamic law (Shari’ah law) in the US which was completely specious

Those are just for starters. That would be perfectly understandable for being a little cranky! But the concept of “Muslim rage” in King Kong raging through the streets is just…as you say suits only the right wing in various countries.

Mona: It’s utterly unrepresentative and also I’m glad to hear that list because there is a moment which we must recognize that injustices have been committed.

Robin: Yes.

Mona: But as a Muslim and as someone from that part of the world, the Middle East and North Africa, from the various Islamic worlds that exist, I also have to add that many of our dictators who are supported by various US administrations and by various European governments, were very happy to use legitimate anger and offense as a way to distract from their own injustices.

Robin: Yes.

Mona: So we also have to position ourselves in the middle of so many people using these injustices for political gain and manipulation. And I like to refer to the first amendment because I’m an Egyptian-American. I love the first amendment when I’m in the United States because the first amendment gives me the right to freedom of expression, the right to worship, the right to offend, and the right to protest offense.

Robin: Pretty good.

Mona: It’s wonderful! But as an Egyptian I know that five US administrations which hold that first amendment holy were happy to support a dictator who denied us those same freedoms in Egypt.

Robin: Yes.

Mona: So my goal for Egypt is for us to have a first amendment and a constitution and a bill of rights that guarantees everybody’s rights in the way that everybody’s rights are guaranteed here. I believe in the freedom to offend. But I also believe in the freedom to peacefully protest offense. That’s what I want our revolution to be about.

Robin: Wow, that’s a real revolution. Stick around, we’re going to come back and do another segment.

We’ll take another short break here. You’re listening to Women’s Media Center Live, the talk show with a brain via WMCLive.com our home on the web. We’ll return in just a moment with more of Mona Eltahawy’s insights into the real Middle East. Don’t you budge.

Robin: And we’re back with Mona Eltahawy the Egyptian-American, journalist, feminist, wonderful trouble-maker person, tell us about what, the work you’ve been doing on sexual harassment in Egypt.

Mona: One of the things I hope to do when I return to Cairo, cause I’m moving from New York to Cairo, is to work with all the fantastic feminist groups on the ground and uh Human Rights activists who, for a long time now have been fighting against street sexual harassment and sexual violence of all kinds. Um one of the best campaigns that I’m a huge fan of is called HarrassMap. And what HarrassMap does is it uses a crowd source platform developed by a group called Ushahidi in Kenya, which I think means “witness” or “to bear witness.”

Robin: Yes it does.

Mona: And what it does is that it encourages women who have been harassed or sexually assaulted in any way on the streets of Cairo to text message or call or send a Facebook message or tweet to the HarrassMap campaign and what they do then is they put this red spot on a map of Cairo and you click on the red spot and then you read the testimony of the women who has reported.

Robin: Excellent!

Mona: And what it does is it basically shows you kind of like the hot areas so you know which areas are particularly bad but it’s also a way of collecting documents and holding authorities accountable so that when the group goes to legislatures when we have a parliament again or when it goes through the police or law enforcement, it can say, “Look how many cases we’ve documented,” that just shows you that the police aren’t taking this seriously and it shows you that we need a much stronger law enforced and you need to take women seriously when they make these complaints.

Robin: Wow. When you and I last talked about the state of the women’s movement per say, in Egypt post the first uprising, (I don’t call it Arab Spring anymore, it’s not a season, it’s a climate) but you were concerned because there were, the groups were in schism, they weren’t necessarily working together, which is understandable because there has hardly been a lot of time to practice under dictatorship. What is the state now? Are people beginning to reach across and call yes or what?

Mona: I think we’ve reached the stage in Egypt where people understand that with a president from the Muslim Brotherhood movement and a still very powerful military, we’re caught between a very bad rock and a very horrible hard place because you’re talking about two sides of one coin: authoritarian, totalitarian, doesn’t believe in civil liberties and for whom and for which women’s rights are, absolutely at the bottom of any totem pole hierarchy and one of the highlights in my last visit to Cairo was attending a meeting that veteran feminists Nawal El Saadawi called in which it brought together various feminist groups, women and men who are interested in focusing on women’s rights at this very, very sensitive stage in Egyptian history. We still don’t have a constitution, and we don’t have a parliament, and the constitution is currently being written by a group of mostly men who I would not hesitate to call misogynists, many of whom actually believe it’s ok for a girl who is only 9 to marry and many of whom are not concerned with women’s rights at all. So we recognize that this is a very sensitive time and if we don’t jump on this it will jump on us. And So Nawal El Saadawi is trying to coordinate all the various groups on the ground into an initiative but I know her initiative is one of at least three. So I think women’s rights activists are looking around now saying, “Ok look, there are so many of us and we’re doing very similar work, let’s get together because we need that power of us together to fight against this misogyny, to fight against this hatred of women, to fight against the military and the fundamentalist movement for whom women’s rights are not a priority.”

Robin: And also so no one group has to reinvent the light bulb, because it doesn’t know what another group is doing.

Mona: Exactly! There is so much fantastic work going on, there is no need to duplicate what other people are doing, let’s just get together. You know, one of the most touching moments in that night was when a senior citizen got up and she had her walking stick with her and she said, “Look, I want you guys to help me go out there and protest because I want to protest with you! But I need help here because I want to know when I can come out and I wanna know that you young kids out there can actually protect me so that if they attack our protest I can stay standing and not have to be knocked over or be hurt [Robin laughs] so can we coordinate this please?” And everyone looked around and said, “Yes! We must!”

Robin: Aw, that’s very cool, ah I need some of these people, in the next 15 minutes I am gonna need exactly that [laughs] . Tell a little bit about, which I find especially exciting, the book. The book that I can’t wait to read, that I can’t wait to help promote, that I ok, say, say, say I’m very excited about this!

Mona: I have such bad Attention Deficit Disorder that I have managed to put off writing a book for years and years but I think finally I’m about to burst so I must. So I’m writing a book that is based on an essay I wrote a few months ago called “Why do they hate us?” and this essay caused a huge ruckus because the point that I was making is that uh a lot of the misogyny against that uh we experience as women in the Middle East and North Africa is driven by sheer hatred for women.

Robin: Yes.

Mona: Clearly and obviously this is not just limited to that region or that…

Robin: Oh you think? [laughs]

Mona: It’s global I’m sure but that’s where I come from and so that’s the region I can most talk about. So I want to write a book that I’m determined to call “Headscarves and Hymens.”

Robin: “Headscarves and Hymens”

Mona: “Headscarves and Hymens” because it’s such a…

Robin: You’re such a wimp, you just just don’t take risks, [Mona laughs] you know. what a pity. If you only had a spine, Mona. [Both laugh]

Mona: I’m trying to provoke them and see how far I can go with this, it’s my contention that for women in the Middle East and North Africa, we’ve come to a point where it’s all about what’s on our heads—the headscarves—and what’s in between our legs—the hymens. So whether you’re talking about female genital mutilation or the so called virginity tests i.e. sexual assault and rape enacted upon female revolutionaries in Egypt by the military it’s really about Headscarves and Hymens and ya know one of those women who survived these horrendous virginity tests and sued the Egyptian Military. A young woman called Samir Abrahim she told a great story during this meeting that Nawal El Saadawi called. She said, “Listen people, we need to get working women in these meetings because I know this woman, who was selling vegetables, she was selling rocket arugula somewhere and this extremist, this Islamist, came up to her and said, ‘Woman you’re not covered properly’ and you know what she did? She took off her blouse and said, ‘How do you like me now?’” [Robin laughs] So those are the kinds of stories that I want to document but also the kind of violations that we have to recognize but you know also one of the things that my books wants to do is to say that we have to identify as feminists. The time where all of these amazing young women who are saying, “No, no, no, it’s not about women’s rights, it’s about everyone’s rights,” I understand that. But we’re at a critical moment in our history and the region and the way we fight it is by identifying it as such. We are feminists, and we draw upon this wonderful history of Nawal El Saadawi, of Doria Shafik who invaded the Egyptian parliament with fifteen hundred women in the 50s, of Hoda Sha'arawi in 1923 who…

Robin: Took off her veil, yes.

Mona: We’re feminists are here and we are fighting.

Robin: I think it’s the most important front there is in the global women’s movement is what women are doing in the Middle East and the most courageous and the most just most important for all of us. Because if it can be done there it can be done everywhere. And it also, if we are not for us, then who is? It doesn’t mean that we’ve been saying, some of us, have been saying for 40 years it isn’t about excluding men but it is, for once, focusing on women who, hello, duh, happen to be the majority of the species.

Mona: And without that social revolution that is driven by women’s rights, the political revolution will fail.

Robin: Exactly.

Mona: Because these are revolutions against patriarchy.

Robin: And you can’t have democracy with only half the people.

Mona: Absolutely.

Robin: So, I’m so glad you’re back, I already have separation anxiety for when you go again, um moving there really panics me—your moving there, my moving there would really panic me too [Mona laughs]. But we’ll have to make the most of it while you’re here and thank you so much for doing this, thank you for everything you do but thank you also for coming here today to be with Women’s Media Center Live.

Mona: Robin, thank you for your inspiration and encouragement and I will be back, I promise you, for regular visits.

Robin: You better.

"Gloria Steinem, feminist author, activist and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center, said Monday during an interview with progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann that she’s rooting for Chicago’s teachers, who this week embarked on their first major strike in 25 years."

For the full story, check out the The Raw Story article.

Progressive Women’s Voices is the premier media and leadership training program for women in the country. Participants represent a range of expertise and diversity across race, class, geography, sexual preference, ability, and generation. They receive advanced, comprehensive training and tools to position themselves as media spokespeople in their fields, thereby changing the conversation on issues that fill headlines. Graduates join a supportive network of alumnae who support each other in their media goals.

With the WMC’s training and support, over 100 Progressive Women’s Voices experts have been featured in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Elle, New York magazine, USA Today, Forbes, Variety, Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times; by the Associated Press and Reuters; on Good Morning America, CNN, MSNBC, CBS Nightly News, Fox News, ABC News, CNBC, Bill Moyers, numerous NPR shows; and within hundreds of other top-tier media outlets.

Introducing the PWV NY Class of 2012:

Chloe Angyal (New York, NY)

Chloe is a freelance writer and blogger from Sydney, Australia currently based in New York City. She is an editor at Feministing, the world’s most-read feminist publication, which provides thoughtful analysis of politics, popular culture, and the state of feminism today. At Feministing, Chloe founded the Feministing Five interview series, for which she interviewed a diverse range of activists, writers, comedians, and politicians, including Senator Al Franken, Rachel Maddow, Alice Walker, and Melissa Harris-Perry. Chloe’s writing has been published in numerous online and print outlets, including Slate, The Atlantic, Salon, Jezebel, The American Prospect¸ Foreign Policy Magazine, The Guardian, GOOD, and The Christian Science Monitor. She writes about a range of issues, with a particular focus on body image, depictions of women and gender in media, and how politics affects young women. Follow her on Twitter @chloeangyal.

Jessica Arons (Washington, DC)

Jessica is the director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program and a member of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at American Progress. Prior to joining American Progress, she worked at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, the labor and employment law firm of James & Hoffman, the Supreme Court of Virginia, the White House, and the 1996 Pennsylvania Democratic Coordinated Campaign. She currently serves on the boards of the Virginia ACLU and the advisory board of Law Students for Reproductive Justice. Jessica has been seen on MSNBC, Fox News, and ABC News; heard on NPR and Clear Channel radio; quoted by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal; and featured in The Baltimore Sun, The Nation, Politico, Slate, the Huffington Post, and RH Reality Check. Her publications include More Than a Choice: A Progressive Vision for Reproductive Health and Rights and Future Choices: Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Law. Follow her on Twitter @jrarons.

Anu Kristina Bhagwati (New York, NY)

Anu is the Executive Director and co-founder of Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN). A former Captain and Company Commander, Anu served as a Marine officer from 1999-2004 and was the second women to complete the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program instructor trainer school, earning a black belt in close combat techniques. Under Anu’s leadership, SWAN has spearheaded legislative reform and litigation to end military rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and domestic violence, and to eliminate all barriers to equal opportunity for service women. Anu has testified before Congress, advised the White House and the United Nations, and has spoken to countless audiences on challenges faced by military women. A regular contributor to the media, Anu has been featured on Piers Morgan Tonight, the CNN Situation Room, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, NPR, the BBC, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek. Follow her on Twitter @servicewomen.

Sunny Clifford (Kyle, SD)

Sunny is a self-proclaimed advocate for Native American females on reservations and feels that she can speak for many of them, as she has shared their experiences firsthand. Sunny is also one of the main characters in an upcoming documentary, “Youth Lakota,” about three young Lakota people living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In the film, audiences will see Sunny gain awareness of women’s rights and politics as she joins in a fight for reproductive rights, led by Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first female president of her tribe. Since filming ended, she has continued her journey of learning about women’s rights in politics and American society. Follow her on Twitter @SunnyClifford.

Brittney Cooper (Highland Park, NJ)

Dr. Brittney Cooper is an assistant professor in the departments of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University beginning Fall 2012. Currently, Brittney is completing her first book project, Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition, 1892-Present, which will interrogate the rise of Black female public intellectuals. Her work looks at issues like the feminist implications of Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl mishap and the importance of Michelle Obama in the tradition of Black female leadership. Brittney is also co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, a feminist of color scholar-activist group that runs a successful blog. The CFC blog has been acknowledged by the Los Angeles Times, TheRoot.com, Clutch magazine, and New York Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @ProfessorCrunk.

Laura Michelle Jimenez (Los Angeles, CA)

Laura is the Executive Director of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice based in Los Angeles, California. Laura began her career with the National Latina Health Organization in Oakland, CA where she led a girls mentorship program and initiated a collaboration between the organization and UC Berkeley to offer a class titled, “Redefining Latina Health: Body, Mind, and Spirit,” as well as an intergenerational conference on Latinas, Sex, and Sexuality. She travelled to New York to initiate  the same class at Hunter College and began working as the Development Officer with the Dominican Women’s Development Center in Washington Heights. During her time with SisterSong, she co-coordinated two conferences and established the Latina Encuentro, a gathering of Latina leaders in the Southeastern Region. Follow her on Twitter @jimenezlaura.

Natalia Oberti Noguera (New York, NY)

Natalia is the founder and CEO of the Pipeline Fellowship, an angel investing bootcamp for women philanthropists. The Pipeline Fellowship works to increase diversity in the U.S. angel investing community and create capital for women social entrepreneurs. Natalia is fluent in English, Spanish, Italian, and French (and is proficient in Russian and determined to learn Mandarin). She has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Dowser, Forbes CSR Blog, ForbesWoman, Mashable, New Prosperity, Reuters Money, TechCrunch, and The New York Times. Natalia was named to the Forbes list “Top 20 Women for Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter” and was selected as a Readers Pick for HuffPost Tech’s “26 Women in Tech You Need to Follow on Twitter.” Follow her on Twitter @nakisnakis.

Sarah Seltzer (New York, NY)

Sarah is a journalist and writer and currently serves as the Associate Editor at AlterNet, where she runs the fast-paced “Hot News and Views” blog several times a week, curates the Health section, edits stories, and writes regularly on the war on women, activism, and popular culture. She is also a regular contributor to the Jewish Daily Forward’s Sisterhood blog, where she covers feminist political, social, and cultural issues. She previously worked for Women’s eNews and RH Reality Check. Sarah’s work has appeared in venues such as the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, and NPR, and on the websites of The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Salon, The Nation, the Women’s Media Center, The Wall Street Journal, Jezebel, The Daily Beast, and Mother Jones. Follow her on Twitter @fellowette.

Deborah Jiang Stein (Minneapolis, MN)

Deborah is an author, educator, and public speaker. She is the author of the memoir, Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison. Other publication credits include fiction and poetry published in various small press literary magazines and several anthologies. Deborah has made various speaking, reading, radio, and television engagements, including NPR, MPR, Carnegie Hall in Lewisburg, West Virginia, numerous Federal and State prisons, and as they keynote in numerous conferences. Deborah is the founder of The unPrison Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving incarcerated women and their children to help reduce incarceration and improve quality of life post-prison. Deborah’s expertise is based on life lessons, including marginalized women and youth, prisons and juvenile detention centers, and the women and girls inside. Follow her on Twitter @deborahdash.

Rebecca Vilkomerson (Brooklyn, NY)

A New Jersey native, Rebecca initially settled in San Francisco where she worked for several years in organizations focusing on welfare rights and homeless family rights, most significantly at the Homeless Prenatal Program. She helped found the People’s Budget Collaborative, which brought together progressive constituencies to work together on local budget issues. After years at the local level, she became the founding director of the California Partnership, a coalition of about 120 local community organizations that came together to advocate on state issues in California around the budget, health care, welfare, and child care. In 2006 she moved with her family to Tel Aviv, Israel, where she worked with a Jewish-Bedouin environmental rights organization and a Palestinian Israel educational think tank. In 2009 she returned to New York and became Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization of which she has been a member since 2002. Follow her on Twitter @jvplive.

As Michelle Obama delivered her outstanding speech at the Democratic Convention last night, at least one network ran a reminder across the bottom of the screen: Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton, and Harvard Law School. Oh, yes, that’s right. This self-proclaimed “Mom-in-Chief” is also brilliant. With a speech like that — arguably better written and delivered than any we’ve heard this election season — she should run for office herself. (President, 2016 anyone?)

Of course many women do run for office, but only belatedly find out elections can look far different depending on the gender of the candidate. This is often true whether the race is for city council or president. Widespread sexism is a major barrier to women’s equal representation. This is why projects like Name It. Change It., which seeks to identify, prevent and end sexist media coverage of women candidates and politicians are so important.

A group of experts in the field of elections spent the day in Charlotte yesterday discussing women running for office. We were brought together by Swanee Hunt, the former ambassador to Austria, philanthropist and women’s advocate. One of her new initiatives, the non-partisan Political Parity, intends to double the number of women in Congress by 2020. That would mean women would occupy 34 percent of the seats, instead of 17 percent -- a number Debbie Walsh of Rutgers’ University’s Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) calls “pathetic.”  The 17 percent figure puts the United States in something like 94^th position in terms of women’s participation in government.

CAWP’s new effort, The 2012 Project, presented some encouraging numbers: women broke the record filing to run for the U.S. House this year: almost 300 did so. More than 160 survived their primaries—and there is hope that in November women will break the 20 percent marker.

And so, yesterday 100 invited women leaders of the Democratic Party (a similar gathering was held at the RNC) sat down to explore women running, and winning. The Women’s Media Center’s Name It. Change It. project is a partnership with Political Parity and She Should Run sponsored by the Embrey Family Foundation and the Barbara Lee Foundation.

Name It. Change It., regularly tracks sexist and gendered coverage of women in politics (you can read some of the many examples on their blog, or follow them on Twitter), but they’ve also produced a media guide to help reporters (and everyone) spot the sexist and gendered coverage of women candidates and politicians.

At the Name It. Change It. panel discussion in the afternoon, which followed a morning of analysis and hard-core, necessary statistics, we got down to the real-life experiences of several successful Congressional candidates. Sitting with us on the panel, led by Sam Bennett, head of She Should Run:  Congresswoman Terri Sewell, Alabama’s first black woman representative, who told of intrusive and inappropriate questioning of her as a single woman running for office; and Latina Annette Taddeo-Goldstein, who ran for South Florida’s 18^th District in 2008. She raised $1.3 million dollars but found herself in a “beauty contest” with media concentrating on her looks, as opposed to her positions. Others told of fabricated video and deliberately sexual front-page innuendo meant to derail their campaigns.

Attorney Gloria Allred, and To the Contrary host Bonnie Erbe rounded out the panel with their years-long experience seeing the sexism, and battling it. Actor/activist Ashley Judd earlier in the day urged women to run, promising that if you step forward, we women will support you. And we got to meet Katherine Archuleta, who is political director of the Obama re-election campaign--the first Latina to hold that position on any major presidential campaign.

The day was kicked off by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Her advice for battling the war against women underway: “Don’t agonize, organize.”

It was money on the mind of famed pollster, and Name It. Change It. partner, Celinda Lake. She said all of her pages of Power Point could be summed up this way: what women candidates need is money. Help them get it, tell them how to spend it, and there will be more women in elective office.

Getting women to run is the first step, but making sure they can fight on a level playing field is equally important.

The numbers come from a selection of 35 influential newspapers from across the country. Today we wanted to share some of the byline breakdowns for individual newspapers. The numbers reflect only news reports and excludes blogs and opinion columns. For any article with two bylines, the gender of the first name was coded for the entire article.

Click the image to enlarge:

Robin: Welcome to Women’s Media Center Live. I’m Robin Morgan. You’re tuned to WeAct Radio 1480AM in the Washington, DC area, or you might be streaming us live through audio and video links at wmclive.com. To the US Audience: Happy day women won the vote! And a special welcome to the international family online from (that I know of) Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, Italy, Kenya, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the pioneering feminists in Kurdistan.

With this show we hope to go behind the camera frames and between the headlines into what I call the “alternative reality” that most women inhabit. Our media is still staggeringly comprised of pale males. And the public gets half the talent and half the story. So we want to expose the real impact of this on men as well as on women. We want to have a “safe-house” here in this hour for extraordinary guests national and international, famous and not-yet-famous, to come and relax and be honest.

A few practical words: If you miss one of the shows, you’ll be able to find us as an iTunes podcast, a YouTube video, and a transcript over at womensmediacenter.com. We’re not going to be able to take calls, at least not at first, but we do have a comment line. And I would really, really like to hear from you. The comment line (haven’t memorized it yet) 347-903-WMC1. And we’ll also check for comments on Twitter hashtag #WMClive.

We share the mission of the Women’s Media Center (or the WMC) which was founded only 7 years ago- my god how time flies when you’re making revolution- only 7 years ago by Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and me. And that mission is to make women visible and powerful in the media so we can all have real democracy. You can find out and be part of many interactive programs on the website at womensmediacenter.com and I can’t resist, I want to share some of them with you right now.  This is not a commercial this is an act of pride.

Women’s Media Center does media training. Progressive Women’s Voices trains women in media skills and leadership skills because in the age of information wow, do we need those.  Media Monitoring and activism: Sexism Sells But We’re Not Buying It is a program we initiated back during the last presidential campaign when Hillary Rodham Clinton was being vilified but we haven’t only defended women of progressive bents; we’ve defended Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman. In other words, whether you agree or disagree with someone’s position, confront them on their position; don’t confront them on their gender. When you demean one woman for being female, you demean us all. Then there’s Name It. Change It. This is one of my favorites. Because of media monitoring and rapid response, we have wrung apologies from some of the major male anchors and talk show hosts for sexist remarks through pressure. Name It. Change It. is a really special program. Then there’s #sheparty on Twitter, which is a happy hour, every Wednesday from 3-5pm. A lot of programs for media and girls: Progressive Girls Voices- training girls in media skills so they grow up empowered, Girls State of the Union, SPARK. Then there’s media experts: You know how they always have said, we would have them on but we can’t find qualified women, well there’s no more excuses because SheSource is the Women’s Media Center’s huge database of women experts on virtually every subject. All issues are women’s issues, so why shouldn’t we have experts on every subject. Then there are special media initiatives like Women Under Siege which is a new project that tracks and documents how rape and other forms of sexualized violence in conflict zones in the twentieth and twenty first centuries have factored into genocide. And because they weren’t given attention by the media it turned into genocide. If they come for us at night and you do nothing, they come for you in the morning.
And then there’s media content on the website: new features that our web editor Mary Thom assigns and edits from known and not-so-well-known writers, and activists and journalists but on subjects and with a passion that they’re not able and free to exercise elsewhere. And then there’s publications: the one, the publication that blows me away is the 2012 Status of Women in the US Media Report. If you have curly hair it will straighten it, if you have straight hair it will make it curly. Visit the website, the statistics alone are worth the trip. Did you know for example that less than 13% of talk show hosts are women? Which reminds me that I want to pay credit in sisterhood to those feminist hosts preceding this show who are highlighted in a feature on womensmediacenter.com right now. Sisters, I will try do you proud.

So now to the rant. Well the rant. The first thing to say about the rant is that the views expressed are mine alone and the commentary does not represent the views of the Women’s Media Center. Second thing is, these are people and issues that made me talk back to my TV and grind my teeth this past week.

For example, folks who think that Paul Ryan has sexy eyes: what? Are they into ferrets?

For example, Julian Assange, you know that he’s been wanted for some time in Sweden for questioning on accusations of rape, sexual molestation, and unlawful coercion brought by two women in Stockholm. So he’s fled and he’s been in Britian which wants to extradite him to Sweden and he fought court cases and he lost court cases and so now he has taken refuge in and has been given asylum by Ecuador and their embassy in London. From whence he wholeforth denounced women in Sweden as feminist, denouncing Sweden as feminist- ah! Take that Sweden! And posturing himself as a martyr to free speech and journalism because he claims the US is vamping on him because of WikiLeaks of classified documents but the interesting thing to me now is that this great champion of press freedom and martyr to it is taking refuge in Ecuador’s embassy. The current President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, and his regime, it’s a leftist regime but it’s authoritarian has been accused of persecuting and jailing journalists who criticize him and his policies. So I’d like to know what part of “no” and what part of “cognitive dissonance” Julian Assange does not understand.  So many troglodytes, so little time.
Teeth grinder: Todd Akin. Well, by now I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on this because we’ve all heard 24/7 about his claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have mystical biological powers that shut down our reproductive…we don’t get pregnant. I want to bring two aspects to this that I haven’t heard much or any attention given in the press. In his willful ignorance, Akin seems to have never heard of ethnic cleansing rape. As in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, as in Rwanda, too many places. This is where one side of men, in trying to send a message to the other side of men, rapes “their” women with the specific intent of impregnating them so that the conquering sperm eradicates their ethnicity. The motive in fact is impregnation for that rape. The other thing I want to add to the discussion is that the term “criminal sexual assault” and the concept of degrees of criminal sexual assault was won by years of work and effort by feminist lawyers who were trying to expose the history of the definition of the crime of rape in English common law and it’s a very patriarchal history. Rape originally meant the violation of an unmarried virgin in English property law. She was the property of her father. Marriage was a property transfer from the father to the husband. So if you violated the virgin, you were violating the property rights of the father. And that required no proof, just the father saying, “You violated my property rights.” But when it moved from that property context into the individual context and the woman became involved, suddenly you needed proof. Suddenly you needed emphasis of, evidence of struggle, suddenly you needed coercion, suddenly you needed a prompt complaint- none of which was applicable for robbery or murder. I can actually remember- back in the days when pterodactyls flew- a few decades ago, when marital rape in this country was not a crime. In fact rape was defined as, “forcing sexual intercourse on a person other than the wife of the accused.” Think about it.
But, there was stuff that made me happy this week as well. Curiosity exploring Mars—happy. The Perseid meteor shower—happy! The Augusta National Golf Club finally—kicking and screaming—admitting women—happy. Look, I’m so not into golf but I know a lot of business and political and media and power transactions take place on golf courses and that’s why they haven’t wanted us there so wherever those transactions are taking place I want women to have the right to be there.
And last, almost happy-making, I admit it: Tropical Storm Isaac—not only because it’s named for yet another poor biblical son with patriarchal issues, father issues, Dad, you’re killing me—but also because if I were a religious fundamentalist I would bellow the following : Ahem, Old Testament God), “Extreme right wing religionists who have seized control of what was once Lincoln’s Republican party, thou hath brought upon thyselves vengeance for thou sins against women and thou must sacrifice thou first born convention day and be drenched not only in thy longtime sharing of Akin’s calumny against women, but yea! drenched in the downpour of the tropics worse because of the climate change thou denyeth.” Fortunately I’m an atheist wiccan so I’d never say that but remember when Pat Robertson declared that the New Orleans devastation was the fault of Ellen DeGeneres? Well…
And that’s the rant this week.

Now, we’re not gonna yell on this show, but that doesn’t mean we can’t practice verbal karate moves while being lethally soft-spoken. One is our interview with the media stance. Among the questions I would like to ask the media is the one about false equivalency. You know this one. This is the one where we organize a demonstration of say 500,000 people on abortion rights and they organize a demonstration of 12 standing at the side of the road sending us to hell, calling us baby-killers and the media says “two sides, two demonstrations on abortion.” I sometimes think that if they said the moon was made of green cheese and we said “actually…” the media would say, “Sides differ over composition of the lunar surface.” They also are preoccupied- the media- with two sides to every question. Well, there aren’t always two sides to every question. First of all, sometimes there are just one- there are not two sides to the fact the world is round and not flat. That’s fact. But sometimes there are more than two sides. Three sides, five sides, eighteen sides. If you have questions you’d like to ask the media, the comment line is 347-903-WMC1 and Twitter hashtag #WMCLive.

Another move in verbal karate is the “Surprise! Words really do mean things!” chop.  Why do we ever adopt their terms? Like their phrase “pro-life.” They’re not pro-life, not of the woman, if the child is already born, certainly not of the child, Akin wanted to take funding away from school lunches. We are pro-choice, they are anti-choice, that’s it.

And last, the sexist word of the week, and its gender-free alternative. Everybody knows about “fireman” and “firefighter” but sometimes even feminists and well-intentioned antisexist men use words with sexist roots without knowing it, unwittingly. So this week’s is: disseminate, seminal, and seminar. They all stem from the root “semen,” but not just semen, semen as the sole creative crucial force to initiate energy. Well, it’s one of them, but without the egg, not so much. For “disseminate” we can use “distribute” for “seminar” we can use “ovular”  for “seminal” we can use “germinal.” There, now you can play “Gotcha!” with your friends.

So now we’ll pause before returning with two very interesting guests and for our last half hour we’ll be talking to pal of many decades Gloria Steinem but we need to take a short break for our listeners on WeAct Radio 1480AM This is Women’s Media Center Live Talk Radio with a Brain. I’m Robin Morgan and we’ll be right back.

[Voiceover with Music:] Coming up: The teenager who successfully launched a national campaign to get a woman moderator for the Presidential debates, Emma Axelrod, joins us next on Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan 1480AM on WeAct Radio.  

And we’re back! On October 16, for the first time in 20 years, a woman-  veteran reporter Candy Crowley of CNN- will moderate one of the Presidential Debates. And on October 11, ABC newswoman Martha Raddatz will be the moderator of the Vice Presidential debate. Why the change? Well, last May three New Jersey teenagers- not old enough to vote- Elena Tsemberis, Sammi Siegel, and Emma Axelrod- organized a petition on Change.org calling for the Commission on Presidential Debates to appoint a woman to moderate one of the debates. Their petition drew over 115,000 supporters by mid-July, so they went to deliver the signatures to the Commission, and were turned away at the door. But then came the victory. It’s a partial one since all the moderators are still European-American but the campaign did succeed though the commission would never admit it. Emma Axelrod, I’m pleased to say, is a graduate of the Women’s Media Center Progressive Girls’ Voices and she joins us today by phone. Emma, are you there?
Emma: Yes! It’s so great to be here.
Robin: It’s so great to talk with you! Tell me, what propelled you three to do this?
Emma: Well, when we learned that there hadn’t been a woman moderator for 20 years we were shocked and wondered why we, people of our gender, were being overlooked as people who could be totally awesome in fulfilling this role and we just wanted to do something about it.
Robin: Oh it’s fantastic! Tell me, if you were the moderator, what kinds of things would you like to ask the candidates?
Emma: Well, I’d like to ask them about big issues facing our nation for all people but of course especially women’s rights. I’d like to ask them about their views on birth control and equal pay- why women are still earning 77 cents to a man’s dollar.
Robin: Good things! Do you think that the other moderators will ask them these things in the absence of a woman?
Emma: They might, but it’s still important to see a woman asking them to know that women have their own role in deciding these important decisions that will affect our lives so I think it’s very important to see a woman up there even if the issues will be discussed addressed them.
Robin: Exactly. You give me hope. Give us an answer to the media that sometimes says,  “Young women aren’t interested in feminism.” I don’t understand this because I speak a lot and I see audiences with lots of young women and some young men and they’re all royally pissed for the right reasons and I don’t think I’m hallucinating them. And then there’s you, and Elena and Sammi. What would you say to people who say, “well younger women don’t care about feminism”?
Emma: I think that they’re wrong. I know a lot of young women, like me, who are very concerned about the issues that face us just because of the gender that we were born into. Maybe some girls are portrayed on the media, on TV, celebrities as caring maybe some girls who do care don’t know how to voice their concerns but the concern is definitely there.
Robin: Where are you going to take your concern from here, Emma? I should have congratulated you, by the way, on the success of this- congratulations! I hope you’re celebrating. How has your life changed, by the way, since the victory?
Emma: A lot of people have seen us on TV and like to congratulate us. I guess more than anything the change has been internal because now we know that being able to create change is possible and it’s sort of freeing, liberating to know we have that power as young women so more than anything the change is internal. But I’m not really sure what our next steps will be, though we’re definitely interested in creating more equal representation.
Robin: That’s great. What do you plan to do yourself, in your own life?
Emma: Well, I’m going to be putting most of my attention into school in the next couple years. I’m going to be starting my junior year of high school so that’s going to require a lot of work but I want to put myself in some powerful career position in my future maybe create some of that equal representation just by being there and encouraging my female peers to do the same.
Robin: Ah, boy, you are fantastic! You give me hope.
Emma: Thank you!
Robin: You are the future, and the present as well. Thank you so much for being with us, and I hope you come back when you make more good trouble.
Emma: Thank you, haha.
Robin: Thank you again, Emma. Bye-bye!
Emma: Thanks for having me.

Oh wow. Now, for those of you who are, as I am, concerned unto panic over what’s happening with voter suppression in this country, our next guest is of special importance. Melanie Campbell is the CEO and Executive Director of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. She’s the convener of the Women’s Coalition for Dignity and Diversity in the Media and she’s an expert on voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, election reform, and cross-cultural coalition building. And we wanted to talk with her about voter ID campaigns, the general scandalous voter suppression and assault that’s going on in our country but because of her schedule she couldn’t be with us live today so a few days ago we sat down and taped this conversation.
Robin: Let’s get right to it, the voter suppression assault that’s going on. Despite that there is absolutely no proof of voter fraud that the folks behind the assault claim is epidemic it’s just blatant suppression of the vote in target populations so Melanie, you’re the expert here, recap if you can, briefly- we have limited time, some examples of what’s happening nationally in terms of voter ID laws in some places or early voting restrictions or I gather in some places poll-watchers are even no longer permitted to tell people which polling places to go to vote and then there’s Texas and Ohio and South Carolina, anyway, give us some examples.
Melanie: It’s a voter suppression tsunami. If you think of places like Florida and Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee as examples of places where the early vote has been cut- where in 2008 that’s what helped get the turnout back up. Look at Florida, Texas, and South Carolina, they’re making it more difficult for people to register. The challenge is that we’re going backwards.
Robin: You know, the impact of these voter ID laws or the suppression in general is huge. I read about Vivian Applewhite who is this woman in her 90’s from Philadelphia who had marched for voting rights with Martin Luther King and had voted in every single election since I think 1960 and because her social security card was stolen from her purse and she’d been adopted so her birth documents didn’t match her other documents, whatever, it was bureaucracy, and she wasn’t allowed of course then to vote. This is obscene. It took her months to fight the bureaucracy and finally get a temporary ID. So talk a little about the impact of this suppression, especially on the African American community, but also on older people and disabled people and students, and single moms with small kids, and caregivers who can’t get out at certain times. Give us a human impact report.
Melanie: Your example, the woman from Philadelphia, is true in many places, including in Georgia for example, you have to have a valid driver’s license, all the information has to be current. Well, 36% of Georgians over 75 don’t have driver’s licenses. That’s not a black thing or a white thing, that’s an American problem. And you have what is taking place, so at the end of the day, we know we have 76 days left and what we have to do is it has to become a national movement to push back on this. US Attorney Holder talked about this being a modern day poll tax and it is.
Robin: It is!
Melanie: We have to push back. Our lawyers are fighting. The legislatures are fighting where they can. But we the people have to fight back, and get those voter IDs and push back where we can before some of those rules before they have a huge impact because I’m really worried about what’s gonna happen on election day when people show up who have been voting for 40 to 60 years and young people who voted for the first time in 2008, it’s not a good thing for America.
Robin: You know, I cut my political teeth in the civil rights movement with guess what? voter registration. So this is so basic to me, I mean, I don’t understand why people aren’t in the streets over it. This is the pulse…this is suffrage and they’re taking it away again. Is there something specific that you can suggest that voters can do to make sure their vote counts?
Melanie: Yes, well first of all, register. And verify, I don’t care how long you’ve been voting, check your voter registration status right now. It’s August, we’ve got some time. Visit the election protections website- and there’s many others out there- to check your status, know if you need a voter ID. We have a Cost of Freedom app- a web app- so people can check in any state. You can go to the National Coalition site: ncbcp.org. Information is gonna be power. And then, a lot of the organizations are working to help people if you cannot afford some of this stuff. Lawyers are there waiting on the Election Protections Hotline, I’m working very closely with Barbara Arnwine, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. They have lawyers now; they usually don’t do it until the month before the election. They have lawyers and law students on the phone at 1.866.OUR.VOTE. Pick up that phone and call and check your status first.
Robin: You’re wonderful. Listen, we’ve gotta go but this is very helpful and you’re just fantastic. Will you promise to come back?
Melanie: Oh most definitely. And thank you for the invitation, anytime!
Robin: Thank you! It’s time for a short break. This is Women’s Media Center Live, the talk show with a brain, on WeAct radio, 1480AM. Do not go away, there’s lots of good stuff to come.
Music and voiceover: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney should answer before they get your vote. You’re listening to Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan on WeAct Radio 1480AM.
Hi, hello, welcome back. We’re back this time, we’re on the phone, I hope we’re on the phone with Gloria Steinem who is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest trying to finish a new book which attempt I am dismally interrupting. Gloria are you there?
Gloria: Yes, I’m here, I’m here!
Robin: Oh that’s a comforting voice. Happy women’s equality day!
Gloria: Yes, happy day to you, too, absolutely. And you know, I want to share, in the midst of things that are not so cheerful, I’d like to share the very cheerful place I am, which is called Hedgebrook. It’s a women writers’ retreat (or advance) for women all around the world and is free and half a dozen terrific women get all day to themselves on wonderful Whidbey Island and the have great conversations at the kitchen table at night.
Robin: Sounds very good. What did you say to me the other day, that you’re a short walk away from a field of lavender?
Gloria: Yes, yes a beautiful field of lavender. Whidbey Island may be somewhere people know but if not you should try it; it’s a huge island a ferry ride away from Seattle and Hedgebrook is 48 acres with little cottages that people live in. It’s truly beautiful.
Robin: And you deserve it. I hope you go wading in the field of lavender and just breathe.
Gloria: Yes. Actually, I have it here and I wish I could transmit it to you.
Robin: I could use it! Well, I’m going to be very unhelpful about this, because I’m going to pull you back from the field of lavender but only for a little while. This is a conflict between me as your friend who wants you to not do this kind of interview and now as an interviewer who wants you to do it- schizophrenic once again. Have you seen, have you had a chance to see the new University of Southern California Annenberg/LA Times poll on politics and the press?
Gloria: Yes I’ve seen some of the results and I think it’s fascinating and important to know that so many more people are continuing to trust traditional and local media. That’s a very important finding. And that the more media they consume, the more likely they are to vote democratic. That has something to say about the different fact levels between the two parties. But I think overall it speaks to the fact that the most important thing is a trusted messenger and I suspect that people go more to traditional and local sources because they have some idea that the New York Times or whatever other traditional source is going to be trustworthy and accurate. And Robin, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think that’s the power of this radio show. People understand that you’re not going to lie to them.
Robin: I’m not going to lie to them. This has gotten me in so much trouble for so long- the not lying, as you well know. But maybe now it’s time for a little truth. SO thank you, darling, thank you for the support. Are we not proud? I wish Jane were here. She will be in a few weeks, but are we not proud of what we hath wrought? I’m back in the Old Testament God. This is the newest baby of the Women’s Media Center.
Gloria: Yes, and I want to speak up for radio as a medium because it is still the most democratic. Literate or not, whether you have expensive equipment or not, you can wind up a radio and tune in. I mean, my dream is that one day, we’ll have a satellite so that around the world, with or without electricity people can use wind up radios (especially women) and talk to each other.
Robin: Especially in the global south, I mean, it is the media, much more than any other kind. Well, are you ready for some breaking news? Because I would like you to comment on this, just as if we were a grown-up interviewer and a grown-up interviewee and not just us. Breaking news (which has never been heard before and we’re breaking now) is brand new research out of the Women’s Media Center partnered with the 4thEstate which is analyzing media coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign and election.  They’ve crunched the numbers on the by-lines of women covering the election; they’ve looked at 35 major newspapers- the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, all the major publications- to see how many stories were written by guys versus how many written by women. They looked at only straight news reporting- no opinion, no bloggers- at all articles covering the presidential election. It turns out 76% were written by men, 24% by women. The numbers are close for both primary coverage and general election coverage. During the primaries 76% were written by men, during the general 73% were written by men, so although I have an idea what you might say, you wanna make a comment on that, please?
Gloria: First of all, I think it’s important as a proviso, in case people have just tuned into us for the first time that we are not talking about biology here. We well understand that there are more men who are more pro-equality and feminist than some women. But it does make a difference whether you’ve been walking around for 40 years as a female or a male, or as a white person or a person of color, and so it is very important to have media that looks like the country. And this is profoundly, profoundly different. It’s especially sinful in this election because the gender gap and the race gap are completely the other way.
Robin: That’s right, that’s right. And these are the folks who are determining what is news. How news will be consumed, defining it. Sometimes I think people that because after much struggle we won the fight so the folks who are in front of the camera are a more representative mix- ethnically, gender-wise, etc- sometimes you’ll even see two female anchors together- whoop-dee-doo! But I sometimes think that people don’t understand that what goes on behind the camera is where the real rubber meets the road- the producers, the directors, the folks who define what is news and in this case define what is election coverage.
Gloria: Yes, and what you were saying earlier is so important, that even the idea of fairness is that there are two sides to every issue when in fact there may be one or thirteen. Furthermore, the definition of objectivity is being evenhandedly negative. It is part of the reason people get so frustrated with the media because it’s not reporting on positive solutions, it sees itself as mostly reporting on the negative. What also makes me throw my slippers at the television set are the generalities about the American people. I counted 27 the other morning on the news, as if we were one homogenous lump—
Robin: The melting pot.
Gloria: Yes, well, we’re more like a big tossed salad with each element keeping its flavor.
Robin: An antipasto!
Gloria: Haha, but if you think that we’re 300 million, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-lingual folks who arrived here somewhere between yesterday and 100,000 years ago, I mean, it is profoundly, profoundly different which is partly what I’m trying to write about in this on the road book that has been going on now for a dozen years.
Robin: In other words, the concept of “the Americans” or “the American peoples”? What can we devise as the alternative?
Gloria: Well for one thing we can reason from the bottom up, instead of from the top down. For instance I was in a school district recently where children speak 127 different languages. Yet that school district is subject to the uniform paper test of the district and on top of that, since school spending is heavily based on real estate taxes those students who need the most get the least. If these kids who speak different languages just have a little boost in the beginning they are going to be the source of immigrant energy that this country has been created by and they are also going to be links to other countries in the world.
Robin: It makes you crazy.
Gloria: And yet they are getting even less of an investment than the kids who uniformly come to school speaking English. So if we just, go on the road so to speak- which is where I spend my life- if we just look at the reality, we can make so much better decisions and uniformity is not a virtue.  People who experience something are the experts at deciding what to do about it.
Robin: That’s always been the theme of the women’s movement, that each woman is an expert in her own life. Starting back when rape in marriage was not a crime, she needed to be to be able to say, “I don’t want this.” Anyway, we’re going to have to take a break shortly and then we’re going to come back and maybe talk about the conventions that are starting- good news or bad news- I’m not sure, and about some new ideas that you and I have discussed that sound really very exciting to me. So we need to take another break; I’m Robin Morgan, this is WeAct Radio 1480AM and you’re listening to Women’s Media Center Live, talk radio with a brain, which we’ll be right back with-tada!- Gloria Steinem.
[Voiceover with music] Coming up next more with Gloria Steinem, as she reflects on the day women got the right to vote and the questions she has for the presidential candidates. This is Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, 1480AM on WeAct Radio.
Robin: And we’re back with Gloria in the lavender field.
Gloria: Yes I’m still here!
Robin: Oh I have separation anxiety when I don’t hear from you! So let’s talk for just a minute, not too long, about the conventions because they used to actually mean something and they’re now weeklong commercials and yet as a news junkie I’m probably gonna watch them anyway. The Republican one will be, you know, you can go snow blind from watching it because it’ll be so white and the Democratic one will be a bit more representative. And I must say, kudos to them on the platform plank about gay marriage; they should have praise where praise is due. But you think there’s anything salvageable in the conventions?
Gloria: You know, I do, if you consider the level of reality TV we usually watch on television, these are far, far more real and they do have a virtue in the sense that people are together in all five senses. We are so used to the Web and looking at a screen that we forget that the reflector cells in our brains don’t work that way that the chemicals of empathy don’t work that way. There’s a virtue to people being physically together as these people are. I don’t think we should turn our noses up at that. I would like to say one thing about the conventions, however, which is that the platform of the Democratic Party represents the majority views of Democrats but the platform of the Republican Party does not reflect the majority views of republicans because the Republican party has been taken over by a right-wing, extremist group, many of whom used to be democrats. I always feel I should apologize to the republicans; they’re the old southern democrats who beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 left the democratic party and gradually took over the Republican party. I think women especially feel this deeply because they are republican by heritage and the republican party was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and in many ways more supportive of equality than the democrats for many many years. They have not left the republican party but the republican party has left them. If we just look at the issues and vote for ourselves, I think we’ll be fine, but we need to get ourselves out of this polarized situation in which half of the equation isn’t even representing the people so-named.
Robin: There’s a group of young republicans- women and me- who are, sort of young turks who are rising against this and particularly the social conservatism. They may be fiscally conservative but they are pro-abortion rights, they’re pro-contraception, they’re pro-women’s rights, gay rights, gay marriage. We’re gonna have one of these women on the show in a few weeks, I hope. To encourage this, you know. They should take back their party.
Gloria: Yes, there could be nothing more important than that, really, than taking back the republican party because since we only have two parties and one of them is controlled by a very small minority, we’re just stymied. You see it in Congress most obviously but you see it in the two sides to every question- you know, one side saying the sky is green and the other saying it’s blue.
Robin: Well also because the more right-wing they become the more the middle moves to the right so the democrats don’t have anyone holding their feet to the fire except us and that they can ignore. Remember a few weeks ago when we were playing with questions that we would like to ask the candidates- were there such a chance? You had some absolute wonderful ones- do you have any of those still in your memory?
Gloria: One is- and has become stronger now that there’s new research out showing that the single most important element in whether a country is institutionally violent or not is not poverty, hunger, democracy, or religion it is the degree of violence against women. We’ve always known that the function of the gender roles at the bottom was to get men to go to war and be masculine to get women to have babies and be feminine at the extreme. But this proves by data gathered externally that the status of women and the treatment of women is the single biggest indicator of institutional violence. So I would ask both the candidates how this plays in their foreign policy- as the single most important element of keeping the peace and keeping this spaceship Earth going- how does it play out in their foreign policy?
Robin: That’s a wonderful one. It’s also nice to have scholarship validate what women have been saying all along.
Gloria: Yes, it’s helpful because it’s an objective view from the outside.
Robin: Do you remember any of the other ones? There were so many good ones that you had. At a certain age, you know, our estrogen goes and our memory just goes with it.
Gloria: I have my issues I’ve fallen in love with, can I talk about those?
Robin: Of course you can, this is our space; you can talk about anything ums wants to talk about.
Gloria: It suddenly occurred to me that the very good-hearted people all over the world- and especially here since this country has capital punishment and other democratic countries don’t- who are working against capital punishment that we all need to see capital punishment without gender divisions. We need to work not only against what’s perceived and what happens to a relatively few number of people as capital punishment and the stoning, all of the honor deaths, everything that is capital punishment for women. The first is state actions the second is state inaction, but both are capital punishment. I’d like to put this idea out into the world to all of the good people working against capital punishment to open both eyes and get rid of the gender division.
Robin: It’s very important, for years- and you’ll remember this- we were pounding at the doors of Amnesty International because what was considered persecution was in their mandate state persecution. But of course women don’t, in a sense, exist in the public realm, we exist primarily worldwide in the private realm, in the home. All the tortures of women—sati, purdah, battery—you name it—child marriage, female genital mutilation, didn’t qualify because they were done in the home—and AI has changed over the years, thank goodness, and that’s a real step forward, a great leap forward. But to put it in terms of state action or inaction, I think covers that and this would make such a huge difference in repositioning the stonings, the beheadings…
Gloria: I want to write about it, to get the facts out about it and I will do that but I think that another way of saying it is definitional. What happens to men is “political,” and what happens to women is “cultural.” But actually it is all political. It can be changed.
Robin: It’s like, when men make it it’s art, when women make it it’s crafts?
Gloria: Yes, exactly.
Robin: What are some of your other wonderful ideas that you had? You said you had a wishlist of ideas.
Gloria: Because of all the recent disasters, certainly gun control has been with us as an issue for a long time. But because of the recent killings domestically, and the demonstration at the United Nations, that our gun control forces are favoring the sale of arms all over the world; they are very, very powerful at the United Nations. It seems to me that only the women’s movement is going to take up gun control and this needs to be a big mainstream movement like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We certainly have a right to, because guns in the home are much more likely to be possessed by battering men, people who are violent and also much more likely to hurt or kill someone who is in the home than to kill any intruder. Yet the whole gun issue is spoken of as if somehow its protecting us. Both by default and by right, the women’s movement, per se, needs to take up gun control.
Robin: It seems that a woman’s work is never done, is it? I mean, first of all, as soon as we win some, we never get credit. If I hear one more person say, “They gave women the vote”- 50 years, 100 years, and women won it. But it never ends, I think my dying word will be “Actually!” and then splat, because I would love to stick around to see how it ends, but it won’t ever end because there will be more issues and somehow it’ll be up to us. More and more men are taking up the cudgels and joining in so that’s encouraging.
Gloria: Absolutely. And if the public opinion polls had the wit to ask men and issues, and who is a feminist and who isn’t they would be very surprised.
Robin: They would be surprised. We have time for maybe one more idea if you have one more idea to lay on the world.
Gloria: I would go back to basics and say, if I had one wish for the women’s movement worldwide, or people who are trying to achieve a world in which we are linked rather than ranked- whether we’re male or female or whatever country we came from- I would wish (and this may make you laugh but I think it’s true) for a worldwide AA- Alcoholics Anonymous. That is a grassroots movement of small groups meeting by the Zambezi River, by the YWCA, in a church basement, all over the world, as with AA groups where you know even if you move from one city to the next, wherever you move you know that you can find a group. They’re leaderless, they’re democratic, they’re free. We are communal creatures so we need to have each other’s support. If we’re isolated and alone, we come to feel crazy. It’s of course where all social justice movements start—black churches in the South in the civil rights movement or the Chinese revolution or the women’s movement and consciousness raising and now we call them book clubs- it’s where movements start and I think we forget that. We especially forget that in the Internet age. Even though you can’t raise a baby on the Internet, you can’t raise yourself or change yourself on the Internet; the highest purpose of the Internet is to bring us together physically and especially in small groups.
Robin: You know, you let you loose in a lavender field and you come up with some very good ideas. We should do this a little more often but the world doesn’t permit it. Are you hungering for Chinese food? You know your women’s group here is waiting for you to come back so we can have Chinese food together.
Gloria: You know Robin I have a request, if there’s time this time or maybe next time. Explain why it is that this is your heritage—that radio is your heritage—why it is that you can time yourself down to the last millisecond.
Robin: Well, you would do this wouldn’t you? It’s because you can still hum my theme song from when I was four. I’ll do it very fast and eventually I’ll do it in greater depth. Yes, yes, yes, world, when I was four years old I had a radio program called “Little Robin Morgan,” and Gloria claims that she heard it and to this day she still can hum the theme song. So that’s one reason why I’m back—you know you return to your roots, no matter what you do. Yeah, I was a working kid and always wanted to be a writer and got out of the business when I was in my teens by the jaws of life and extricating me. So there, Gloria has outed me—actually I outed myself in the memoir, Saturday’s Child—but you did it on the first show and I love you for it.
Gloria: Laughing, I think people should know why you’re so good at it.
Robin: Thank you and bless you. I love you and we miss you! Take care of yourself and think more good thoughts and smell that lavender.
Gloria: Yes, and I’ll see you very soon and congratulations on this very first show for Women’s Equality Day; it’s great.

That is our show. Please remember to let us know what you think and feel the comment line is 347-903-WMC1 and on Twitter its hashtag #WMCLive. In addition to hearing us on WeAct Radio 1480AM in the DC area you can find us streaming in real time in audio and video from links at wmclive.com. You’ll be able to find us as a podcast on iTunes, as a video on YouTube, and the day after each program as a transcript that you can access at womensmediacenter.com. We are everywhere! You cannot escape us. Resistance is futile.
Here is the family, the amazing remarkable family, for Women’s Media Center Live. WMC President and, for this program, Executive Producer, Julie Burton; Senior Producer, Cristal Williams Chancellor; Online Producer, Michelle Kinsey Bruns; Producer, Peter James Callahan; and Production Assistant, Nora Eakin. I’m Robin Morgan wishing you a not-too-aggravating week. We’ll hope to see you here next Sunday and please meanwhile remember: information is power. We can’t have real democracy without it. Women are more than half the population; we can’t have real democracy without us. That equation spells Women’s. Media. Center. Live. Bye-bye now.
Voiceover: Women’s Media Center Live is brought to you by Regina Kulik Scully, our superwoman for women in media.

Progressive Women’s Voices is the premier media and leadership training program for women in the country. Participants represent a range of expertise and diversity across race, class, geography, sexual preference, ability, and generation. They receive advanced, comprehensive training and tools to position themselves as media spokespeople in their fields, thereby changing the conversation on issues that fill headlines. Graduates join a supportive network of alumnae who support each other in their media goals.

With the WMC’s training and support, over 100 Progressive Women’s Voices experts have been featured in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Elle, New York magazine, USA Today, Forbes, Variety, Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times; by the Associated Press and Reuters; on Good Morning America, CNN, MSNBC, CBS Nightly News, Fox News, ABC News, CNBC, Bill Moyers, numerous NPR shows; and within hundreds of other top-tier media outlets.

Introducing the PWV DC Class of 2012:

Alexandra Acker-Lyons (Mountain View, CA)

Over the past 10 years Alexandra has worked for candidates and campaigns, party committees, and progressive organizations, with an emphasis on youth politics. Alexandra is a recognized political commentator and appears regularly on CNN, Fox News, and in numerous national print publications. Currently, Alexandra is a consultant for the Youth Engagement Fund, a collaborative project of the Democracy Alliance and civic engagement foundations, and Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign. She also travels internationally as a consultant and trainer for the National Democratic Institute and is the author of the recently published book, The Political Ladder: Insider Tips on Getting a Job in Politics.

Jennifer Crumpton (New York, NY)

Reverend Jennifer Crumpton earned a Master of Divinity in 2011 from the Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, where she studied inter-faith dialogue, feminist theology and social ethics, and she was ordained in the Christian Church. She previously spent 12 years as an advertising executive creating strategic campaigns for global clients such as Citigroup and the MasterCard “Priceless” campaign. Along the way she also appeared in off-Broadway theater productions, independent films and commercials, and as a playwright, her one-act comedy “Shucked” was staged in New York’s theater district. She is currently the Communications Director at Intersections International, a New York-based NGO that works internationally with communities in conflict toward peace and reconciliation. Jennifer is an author, speaker, columnist for Patheos and writer for the Huffington Post, among other publications. Follow her on Twitter @JenniDCrumpton.

Kimberly Ellis (Pittsburgh, PA)

Affectionately known as “Dr. Goddess,” Kimberly Ellis, PhD is a scholar of American and Africana Studies, an artist, activist, and entrepreneur who loves technology and social media. She has successfully won the “Raise Your Hand! No Casino on the Hill!” campaign, helped with the first Community Benefits Agreement for the State of Pennsylvania, ran RootsCamp Pennsylvania 2010 and is the social media consultant for a number of campaigns. Her work on American studies, history, women’s studies, theater and popular culture can be found in The Paradox of Loyalty; An African American Response to the War on Terror, on Ebony.com, TheLoop21.com, MSNBC, NPR Radio, and more. Follow her on Twitter @drgoddess.

Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas (New York, NY)

Jessica is the Executive Director at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the only national reproductive justice organization that specifically works to advance reproductive health and rights for Latinas. Jessica was honored by El Diario/La Prensa and Huffington Post Latino Voices on pressing reproductive health issues in the Latina community, as well as a regular voice in outlets such as NPR, the Boston Globe, and The New York Times. Jessica provided content for the Reproductive Justice Briefing Book: A Primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Justice and served as an Advisory Member for the publication of Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies. She has received proclamations from the New York State Senate, New York State Assembly, and the New York City Council for local and national leadership. Follow her on Twitter @jgonzalez_rojas.

Fatima Goss Graves (Washington, DC)

Fatima is the Vice President for Education and Employment at the National Women’s Law Center, where she works to promote the rights of women and girls at school and in the workplace. Fatima advocates and litigates core legal and policy issues relating to at-risk girls in school, including those that impact pregnant and parenting students, students in a hostile school climate, and students participating in athletics. She uses a number of advocacy strategies in her work on these issues, ranging from public education and legislative advocacy to litigation, including briefs in the Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals. Prior to joining the Center, Fatima worked as an appellate and trial litigator at Mayer Brown LLP.

Sarah Granger (Los Altos, CA)

Sarah has over 20 years of experience in technology and new media, including policy, politics, and social good. She recently founded the Silicon Valley—based Center for Technology, Media & Society, dedicated to educating, informing, and connecting stakeholders around converging topics like transparent e-government, high-tech workplace flexibility, and gender bias online. She is also a Fellow at the Truman National Security Project and co-chairs their cybersecurity expert group. Sarah writes regular online columns at the Huffington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has also been published in Security Focus, Spectrum magazine, Forbes Russia, and MSNBC. Follow her on Twitter @sarahgranger.

Deepa Iyer (Takoma Park, MD)

Deepa is the Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), a national non-profit organization in the Washington, DC area. An attorney by training, Deepa has previously worked at Asian American legal organizations as well as the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she litigated immigration-related unfair employment practices and addressed the post-September 11 backlash facing South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, and Arab American communities. She is the Executive Producer of a documentary on hate crimes, has written extensively on the post 9/11 backlash, and taught classes at Columbia University, Hunter College, and the University of Maryland. Deepa has been quoted and featured in print and media outlets including The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and community press.

Koritha Mitchell (Columbus, OH)

Koritha is author of the award-winning book Living with Lynching and is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Her research centers on African American literature, violence in American history and culture, and black drama and performance. Koritha has been invited to lecture at Northwestern, Lehigh, and Columbia University, among others, and in community spaces such as the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati and the Atlanta Cyclorama & Civil War Museum. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation and the American Association of University Women. Koritha is also the Columbus ambassador for Black Girls RUN!, a national organization encouraging African American women to make fitness and healthy living a priority. Follow her on Twitter @ProfKori.

Pamela O’Leary (Arlington, VA)

Pamela is the Executive Director of the Public Leadership Education Network (PLEN) and she currently serves on the Board of Directors of Running Start, an organization dedicated to inspiring young women to run for public office, and is a facilitator for their Elect Her-Campus Women Win program. Pamela was elected to the Executive Committee of the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO) and co-founded Hope for Justine, an international solidarity group to support threatened women’s human rights activists from the DRC. She is a contributing author for The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Women in Today’s World and for UChic: The College Girl’s Guide to Everything. Follow her on Twitter @olearypd.

Ilaha Omar (Los Angeles, CA)

Ilaha Omar is an Afghan born entrepreneur and philanthropist living in Hollywood, California. Today, Ilaha co-owns and operates a successful technical staffing company, Multipoint Wireless LLC, which specializes in the placement of contract personnel within all areas of technology throughout the United States. She has also aided many women and children in post-Taliban Afghanistan, led multiple donation drives for post-tsunami Sri Lanka, and shipped relief goods to orphanages in Burundi and Mexico. Ilaha continues to be a champion for women’s rights wherever they live, supporting programs and organizations that are committed to women’s self sufficiency and empowerment through women-owned business and the creation of sustainable and educational opportunities.

Nicole Rodgers (Washington, DC)

Nicole Rodgers is the co-founder and Editor-In-Chief of Role/Reboot and a senior brand and marketing strategist for public interest clients, including PBS. She is a former Vice President at Fenton, the nation’s premier public interest communications firm, where she ran Fenton’s branding and messaging practice for the DC office and was part of the Education and Women’s practice groups. Nicole has guest lectured at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and written about gender, culture, and politics for the Huffington Post, The American Prospect, Alternet, The Good Men Project, and Hypervocal.

Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, in an interview for St. Louis’s KTVI, said something nearly every functioning adult understands to be inaccurate, that women “rarely” conceive from “legitimate rape” because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

It’s a statement so bizarre and inaccurate that even the original interviewer has acknowledged it was a mistake not to follow up during the interview.

In the first day of stories surrounding Akin’s remarks it seems some reporters were so eager to talk about the political fallout that they never got around to even mentioning it wasn’t true. (Some reporters, although not all. A standout example is The Washington Post’s coverage which not only spelled out that the science is closed on this issue, but put Akin’s comments in context of others who have said similar things.)

But too often the initial reporting was similar to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” which only said that “journalists and bloggers” were asking which doctors Akin’s got his facts from? Rather than using their own reporting or authority to correct the inaccuracy, “Morning Edition” instead punted to the Washington Post which they said “cited a study that tens of thousands of women become pregnant through rape each year.”

An Associated Press story by Jim Salter quotes Akin, but never explicitly says his views are inaccurate. Relying instead on a quote from Mitt Romney as the only refutation of Akin’s misguided beliefs in how biology works. 

The New York Times story “Senate Candidate Provokes Ire With ‘Legitimate Rape’ Comment” manages to squeeze in that the remarks “provoked howls of outrage from Democrats and women’s rights organizations” (“howls” seems to be code for “it’s politically expedient to for them to be upset”), but no mention at all that Akin’s views are flat out wrong.

Most GOP-connected media pundits, or at least the ones not running for office, also seemed to have little interest correcting the misconception, instead complaining the “outrage” over the remarks is already greater than their offense.

But shouldn’t the public expect more clarity and accuracy from so-called legacy media? There’s no wiggle room on this, just like the earth isn’t flat and the sun doesn’t rise in the West, women can and do get pregnant from rape. Reporters have studies to back them up on this if they need it, but anyone with a functioning grasp of biology or world history already knows this.

The most boneheaded response from a non-politically connected media personality was probably Politico reporter David Catanese, whose initial reaction wasn’t to point out how wrong Akin was but have a debate about what he might have meant, like maybe some rapes aren’t “real.” What’s the science, he asks, on real rapes not causing pregnancy? The population of Twitter seemed to get mightily offended that Catanese wanted to show how everyone was just misunderstanding Akin’s actual words. For a short while Catanese tried to argue that he was just talking about a narrow point (real rape verses those-who-lie-about-rape?) and folks were unfairly getting angry at him. He tweeted back that “The left is often 1st to shut down debate as ‘off limits’ when it deems so” and “So perhaps some can agree that all rapes that are reported are not actually rapes? Or are we gonna really deny that for PC sake?”

By the next morning however, Catanese gave up fighting about it, although with a statement that seemed to blame everyone’s response when he just wanted to have “nuanced conversation on highly charged issue on here.” Subsequently a public memo from Politico editor-in-chief John Harris, said that Catanese "crossed a line a reporter shouldn't cross on Twitter” requiring that they remove him from further Akin coverage.

If Monday’s news is any judge this story looks like it has legs. While it’s good to see some follow-up reporting, including Politico’s, have spent time debunking the inaccuracy, it’s still sad that in the initial reporting correcting flat-out inaccuracies, even in passing, wasn’t in many reporters’ stories. This should have been an easy call since it’s both easily debunked and widely accepted that women can get pregnant from rape.

Of course, while most people on the planet accept that fact, and Akin has since clarified that when he said “legitimate rape” he meant “forcible rape” – whatever that’s supposed to mean – his view is hardly unique. Dave Weigel of Slate mentions that Bryan Fischer from American Family Association took to Twitter to defend Akin and linked to a 1999 essay from the former president of the National Right to Life Committee that seems to hold the same belief as Akin.

Strange as it sounds, some people (apparently including someone who's been a member of the House of Representatives since 2001) do believe this is how biology works. If news reporters can’t bother to correct the record even once, then they should understand how such attitudes fester and sometimes become the unspoken basis for bills regarding rape victims.

Crowley will be the first woman in over 20 years to moderate a presidential debate. The last woman to do so was Carole Simpson of ABC News, who served as moderator of a 1992 debate between Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot.

Crowley was honored at the first Women's Media Center annual Media Awards in 2009 for her clear and probing political correspondence during a contentious election.

This fabulous news comes in the wake of a Change.org petition created by a graduate of The Women's Media Center's 2012 Progressive Girls' Voices media and leadership training, Emma Axelrod. With classmates Sammi Siegel and Elena Tsemberis, Emma petitioned the Commission on Presidential Debates to engage a woman journalist to moderate one of this fall’s planned debates. The petition has gotten over 120,000 signatures.

The Women's Media Center team proudly congratulates Emma and her fellow petitioners on this stunning success.

The moderator for the the vice-presidential debate will also be a woman--Martha Raddatz of ABC. The other presidential debate moderators will be Jim Lehrer of PBS and Bob Schieffer of CBS.

While we are thrilled with this news, it's crucial to point out that the Commission on Presidential Debates failed to appoint a single person of color as moderator for the 2012 presidential and vice presidential debates. At the risking of seeming eternally disatisfied with the representation of marginalized communities in media, we would be remiss not to point to this discrepancy.

Furthermore, The New York Times political blog, The Caucus, asserted that "the announcement may not necessarily be viewed as a coup for female journalists." The Gender Report explains why:

Both Lehrer and Schieffer will moderate the two traditional debates at the highest level. In these debates, the moderator selects the topics and questions. In contrast, Crowley will host the only town-hall style debate in which citizens will ask questions of the candidates and the moderator will “facilitate discussion.” And, as previously noted, Raddatz is hosting the vice-presidential debate. In other words, the two debates between the highest level candidates where the moderator has the most influence and say will still be moderated by men.

So, two women out of four presidential and vice presidential debate moderators is great news, but does not necessarily signify total parity and accurate media representation.

Photo: Emma Axelrod. Credit: Carly Romeo, Two Spoons Photography

Mitchell quotes Women's Media Center's Name It. Change It. project's blog:

Since her debut in the political arena, Elizabeth Warren has been a lightning rod for media attention from both supporters and oppenents. However, there comes a time when it is vital to draw distinctions between the legitimate commentary she receives based on her politics and the repeated attacks launched against her because of her age and gender.

However, Mitchell suggests that if the Herald thinks it's hurting Warren's candidacy, it may be barking up the wrong tree:

But sexism, indeed, might work in Warren's favor, given the usual breakdown of voters in the state, meaning more than half are women.  Far more effective will be constructing a class divide, which the Herald works even harder at.

We would like to think that the Herald's sexism would backfire but we have yet to see any evidence that it does anything but make everyone involved look bad. This is why calling out sexism, and making it recognizable as such, is so important.

Read Mitchell's full column at The Nation's blog, and for more media monitoring of sexist coverage of female political candidates, visit the Name It. Change It. site.

Across six categories in awards given for directing 31 men were nominated but only a single woman, Lena Dunham for her show "Girls."

In the six categories in awards given for writing, women make up only 18 percent of the nominees.

To shine a spotlight on just one award for writing we found a familiar pattern of a lack of women. For example, the award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety series, which constitutes the bulk of names nominated for writing and includes the comedy writing teams of "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report," "Saturday Night Live" and "Real Time with Bill Maher," the gender ratio is particularly unbalanced with a mere 12 women nominated compared to 58 men. This is hardly the first year the lack of women in late-night comedy has been noted. However there's one bright spot. The newcomer to the category, sketch-comedy show Portlandia, has two women and two men nominated.

But it’s not only in writing and directing where women are underrepresented. The importance of the role of executive producer in creating a television show cannot be overstated. But across seven categories, such as the awards for Outstanding Reality Competition and Outstanding Children’s Program, there were only 30 listed female executive producers compared to 63 men.

In the 69 non-performance Emmy categories women were underrepresented in all but a handful of roles. Sixteen categories had no women nominated at all. There were no women nominated as cinematographers or stunt coordinators. Of 69 categories the only roles where women outnumber men were in Documentary Filmmaking, Art Direction for multi-camera or single camera series, casting, costumes, hairstyling, and non-prosthetic make-up.

Directing

Outstanding Directing For A Comedy Series
1 woman
5 men

Outstanding Directing For A Drama Series
0 women 
5 men

Outstanding Directing For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Dramatic Special
0 women
5 men

Outstanding Directing For A Variety Series
0 women
5 men

Outstanding Directing For A Variety Special
0 women
5 men

Outstanding Directing For Nonfiction Programming
0 women
6 men

Writing

Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series
2 women
3 men

Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
2 women
6 men

Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special
1 woman
6 men

Outstanding Writing For A Variety Series
12 women
58 men

Outstanding Writing For A Variety Special
3 women
21 men

Outstanding Writing For Nonfiction Programming
1 woman
4 men

* To the fullest possible extent we tried to verify the gender of all the Emmy nominees in every non-performance category using what information we could confirm online.

“Women are the majority of the population in this country, but we are a minority voice in government, business, and the nonprofit community,” Chris Jahnke, media trainer and founder of Positive Communications said. For the past 20 years Jahnke has helped women prepare for public appearances, including First Lady Michelle Obama for her International Olympic Committee speech.

“PGV is a very exciting opportunity to help girls and young women learn how to speak out effectively. These skills will help them build successful careers and lives, and will also help the women’s community further a progressive agenda,” Jahnke said. 

The young women involved in PGV are eager to ensure that their voices contribute to the changing landscape of feminism and media, largely owing to the negative effects that the media can have on girls and young women.

“We are educated about how polluted the world is but we never question how polluted the media is. Young girls are consuming without questioning, and this leads to dangerous ideals that carry throughout their lives,” Katherine Lazo, a 2012 PGV alumna, said. “Young girls deserve to be media literate.”

For these young women, the most important tool to help them change the media is their collective voice. The PGV workshops were designed to show them the many ways they can contribute to the media on their own terms. WMC Vice President of Programs Jamia Wilson started things off by introducing public storytelling, elevator pitching, and girls owning their expertise. Elisa Kreisinger, video content manager for the WMC, spent Friday afternoon teaching PGV trainees about video remixing, and showed the girls how they can put their own spin on sexist content by editing and changing the dialogue to produce the message that they want to communciate.

On Saturday the girls were educated on how to deliver their messages in person via a media interview. Jahnke worked with the PGV trainees to educate them on how to handle the media landscape, how to develop and cultivate their media messages, and how to conduct themselves during an interview. The girls were able to practice one-on-one with Chris on camera to see how their style translated on screen. “I’m excited to use the public speaking skills that I developed in the PGV program. Being able to voice the message I want to send in a clear, effective way will be a tremendously powerful tool,” Emma Axelrod, a 2012 PGV alumna said. 

The girls also learned how to deliver their messages through the written word. WMC staff members Jamia Wilson and Madeleine Gyory, programs coordinator and social media associate, both gave presentations on how to effectively maneuver the growing social media landscape. Wilson informed the girls of the different social media platforms available to them and how to best utilize each one to achieve their goals and leverage media opportunities, while Gyory educated the group on internet safety, how to combat cyberbullying, and tools to deal with online harassment.

WMC Communications Manager Rachel Larris provided the girls with the ins and outs of op-ed writing, a tool which can prove especially useful considering the demographics of our PGV trainees. Larris encouraged all of the girls to submit their own op-eds, as even the editors of the most elite publications lament that they don’t receive enough content from young women and teens.

“The most important lesson I took away from the program is that the media really needs to get the voices of teen girls and that I am one of the people that can help change the face of the media,” Margaret Heftler, a 2012 PGV alumna said of the weekend’s workshops. “From taking part in the program, I feel empowered to get my voice out there, have the tools to do so, and recognize how important it is that I and girls like me take action and get involved in shaping the media.”

The girls were then able to participate in a distinguished intergenerational media panel, featuring Anaheed Alani of Rookie magazine, Shelby Knox of Change.org, Samhita Mukhopadhyay of Feministing, Amy Rose Spiegel of Rookie magazine, and Julie Zeilinger of TheFBomb.

“I read feminist blogs, such as Feministing and Jezebel, and felt that a voice was missing from teen feminists and I sought out to fill that void,” said Zeilinger when asked why she launched her feminist blog, TheFBomb. At only 19-years-old, Zeilinger was a perfect example of what these girls can accomplish with their determination and new skill set.

Mukhopadhyay spoke on how it is often more difficult for women to get their voices heard because people tend to focus on other parts of their body: “You have to prove you belong there—that you look good enough to be there, and then that you know enough about the subject matter.” But she did not want that factor to deter young women.

“This was a whole generation of women missing. If we want our activism to be recorded as players in the feminist history, we have to tell our stories,” said Mukhopadhyay.

But this weekend was also about allowing these girls to explore their connections to feminism in a safe space. On Saturday the girls viewed the HBO documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words about the life of Gloria Steinem. In a discussion following the film, the girls were asked to define what feminism means to them and the role that it plays in their lives.

“I guess feminism means being viewed as an individual rather than a woman—being viewed as what you bring to the table rather than what gender you are. When [Gloria] was writing, she was being assigned all of these pieces based on her gender and I feel like when we have a fully feminist world she would be seen as a writer,” Axelrod said.

As the girls filed out of the room Sunday afternoon, it was clear that this was not the last we will be seeing of these inspiring young women. When looking back over the weekend’s events, 2012 PGV alumna Taylor Palmer said that the most important lesson she took away from the program was a newfound confidence in herself and in her views.

“Just because I don’t have a degree or have numerous awards or credentials doesn’t mean my views are invalid or meaningless. I can also make a difference and change lives just by owning my expertise,” Palmer said.

For more #PGV, check out the Facebook photo album and see the #PGV twitter conversation storified.

Progressive Girl’s Voices (PGV) is the premier media and leadership-training program for girls in the country. Representing a range of expertise and diversity across race, class, geography, and generation, participants receive advanced, comprehensive training and tools to position themselves as media spokespeople in their fields, thereby changing the conversation on issues that fill the headlines.

Progressive Girls’ Voices trainings and webinars help girls develop leadership, media, and activism skills. In 2011, Progressive Girls’ Voices graduates represented the Women’s Media Center at the Sundance Film Festival and interviewed Robert Redford, Geena Davis, Tiffany Shlain, and Danny Glover, as well as produced a video that has received thousands of views. Graduates also blog for the Women’s Media Center, bringing their unique voices to the conversation. We have also trained girls and young women bloggers from SPARK Movement and the Arab American Association of New York, among other girl-serving organizations and institutions.

Introducing the PGV Class of 2012:

Emma Jacoby Axelrod

Emma is 16 and lives in New Jersey. She is the co-author of a Change.org petition for the Committee of Presidential Debates to choose a woman to moderate one of the 2012 Presidential Debates and has been featured on MSNBC, The Huffington Post, the Star Ledger, abcnews.com, and NPR for her efforts.

Sage Ayan Ora Gray

Sage, originally from Jamaica, is 19 years old and lives in New York. She is a passionate vegan who enjoys exploring her creativity and artistic expression through her dance, fine art, acting, and calligraphy. She is currently studying business and management and hopes to pursue a career in the media communications.

Margaret Rose Heftler

Margaret is a 16 year-old high school sophomore in New York City. She explores media through creative writing and has won many awards for her original poetry. She is passionate about expanding access to education and has volunteered her time for organizations such as Pencils of Promise and the Guggenheim family art education program.

Brianna Henry

Brianna is a rising sophomore studying anthropology and women's studies at UMass Amherst. She hopes to one day attend law school and work with international human rights issues that affect women and children.

Navya Lakkaraju

Navya is a student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick where she majors in comparative literature in postcolonial and colonial studies and minors in South Asian studies. She serves as President of the Women's Center Coalition and is currently an intern for the Women's Rights Program at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Katherine Lazo

After experiencing firsthand how women of color are typecast in acting roles, Katherine has moved from being on camera to working behind the scenes and is now studying advertising and marketing communication at FIT in New York City. She has her own blog on sexism, racism, and advertising, and hopes to educate herself and her peers on sisterhood and feminism. Check out Kat's blog and youtube channel. 

Taylor Palmer

Taylor is a former Teen Angel who was featured in Seventeen Magazine for her research surrounding cyberbullying. She currently attends Syracuse University and loves to discuss current events.

Briana Schwartz

Brianna is an aspiring actor at the Middlesex County School of Arts in New Jersey. She recently created a campaign at her school--the Binge Love Purge Hate campaign--to spread awareness about eating disorders in teens and women.

Emma Shakarshy

Emma recently graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University with a double major in English and women's studies. She has worked as a feminist youth worker in nonprofit organizations such as Girls Write Now, Strong Women Strong Girls, Teen Voices Magazine, and the Sadie Nash Leadership Project. Emma is the co-creator of the feminist humor blog Humorless Feminists and is a contributing blogger at AdiosBarbie.com.

Sofia Caballero Stafford

Sofia is the founder and chair of the Community Service Board at her high school in Manhattan. She became interested in journalism after she took a broadcast journalism class as a sophomore, and since then she has served as a teen reporter for Girl Up at the Social Good Summit in NYC and the Clinton Global Initiative and has blogged for Huffington Post Teen and MTV ACT.

Desiree Ann Wilson

Desiree works as an intern at Girl's Education and Mentoring Services and currently studies Human Services with the hopes of changing how the media affects youth.

It's not that we're grateful to unfunny comedian Daniel Tosh for attacking an audience member from the stage of a comedy club in L.A. by saying it'd be "funny" if she "got raped by, like, 5 guys, right now"—but it's been a gorgeous thing to watch the way the feminist community stepped up when it happened. They quickly moved the conversation from whether Tosh is a jerk and a hater (obviously) and whether free speech guarantees him immunity from criticism (obviously not), on to a conversation that's much more nuanced and more important: is there any humor to be found at all in the subject of rape?

There are those who will say "no, never." Considering that rape is both brutal and—especially for women—horrifically commonplace in American society, it's not hard, if you are a person with a vagina or a soul, to understand that take on it. But it's also worth examining the role that comedy can play in subverting dominant paradigms, since rape culture is in urgent need of some subversion, and ASAP.

Our Video Content Manager, Elisa Kreisinger, has created a new video, "Rape Joke Supercut: I Can't Believe You Clapped for That." A collaboration between Elisa and us at the Women's Media Center as well as Fem 2.0 (a project of Turner Strategies) and Jenn Pozner at Women In Media & News, the video aims to suggest that there is a crucial difference between playing rape for cheap laughs, and mocking or exposing the deep-rooted sexism that feeds and sustains rape culture.

Check out the video, and for just a few of the many other thoughtful examinations of this question that have come out of the feminist blogosphere this week, see Lindy West's How To Make a Rape Joke at Jezebel; Kate Harding's 15 Rape Jokes That Work, and Progressive Women's Voices alum Jessica Valenti's Anatomy of a Successful Rape Joke at The Nation.

CBS News: "Syria forces reportedly using rape, sexual torture in fight against opposition," July 12, 2012

Time magazine: "Is the Syrian Regime Using Rape as a Tactic of War?" July 12, 2012

Yahoo: "Syrian Diplomat Defects to Rebellion," July 12, 2012

Reuters: “Rape, assault are weapons of war in Syria - rights group,” July 11, 2012

Al-Arabiya: “Rape, assault are weapons of war in Syria,” July 11, 2012

BBC World Service (radio): To listen, click the fourth "listen" button and go to minute 26:30.

Global Post: “New project charts rape in Syria,” July 11, 2012

Mladina (Slovenian newspaper): “Stranski produkt konflikta v Siriji je brutalno spolno nasilje,” July 12, 2012

The Times of Israel: “Middle Eastern musical chairs,” July 12, 2012

Women’s New Network: “Women’s Media Center project uses crowd-maps to locate rape during global conflict,” July 12, 2012

On July 3, Fourteen year-old Julia Bluhm was able to make this exclamation to the more than 84,000 signatories of her Change.org petition. Bluhm and her fellow Sexualization, Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge (SPARK) movement activists presented Seventeen Magazine with a petition asking them to show girls real pictures of themselves and commit to featuring one unaltered image a month. 

After the girls protested outside their offices and hand delivered the petition, Seventeen announced that it promised to “never change girls’ body or face shapes” when retouching images. An important step towards more positive media role models and healthier body image for teen girls was taken as the entire editorial staff signed a pledge outlined in the editor’s letter of Seventeen. But this was just the beginning of the revolution in the way girls see themselves across the girls’ magazine industry. Their focus now is on Teen Vogue.

Earlier this year, Vogue pledged to not work with underage models or models that appear to have an eating disorder. They also pledged to encourage their designers to provide more realistically sized samples for models’ outfits. While this was a great first step, SPARK wants Teen Vogue to take an even bigger step and follow Seventeen's example and pledge to not alter any model’s body or face and to celebrate beauty in all its forms.  While they have already reached 25,000 signatures, SPARK activists hit the red carpet in front of Teen Vogue’s headquarters earlier today in a mock fashion show to deliver a petition asking Teen Vogue to #KeepItReal.  Before the “catwalk” activism took place, the girls were media trained by Women’s Media Center (WMC) VP of Programs Jamia Wilson. Look forward to a video later this week with footage that WMC’s Video Manager Elisa Kreisinger captured throughout the event.  But for right now, look below for how you can get involved and check out some pictures from this morning’s event.

After marching down the “catwalk” in front of Teen Vogue’s office, Carina Cruz and Emma Stydahar, fellow SPARK activists, marched into the office to talk with Teen Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Amy Astley. “We’re really hoping to try and get magazines to realize that they should have a diverse array of models,” said Cruz. While Seventeen quickly realized this, it seems that Teen Vogue is going to take more time. In recounting their meeting with Astley, Stydahar felt that the meeting was “a lot of telling us we hadn’t done our homework, and that Teen Vogue is a great magazine, who is being unfairly accused.”

In a statement made to ABC News, Teen Vogue said, “We feature dozens of non-models and readers every year and do not retouch them to alter their body size.” Following the meeting, Stydahar and Cruz remain committed to their goal of calling for a public pledge from Teen Vogue. Stydahar and Cruz will not give up and if you'd like to help them with their campaign please check out the links below.

As a member of SPARK’s leadership committee, The Women’s Media Center collaborates with hundreds of girls ages 13-22 and more than 60 national organizations to reject the commodified, sexualized images of girls in media and support the development of girls’ healthy sexuality and self-esteem.

For more information on Julia Bluhm and her campaign against Seventeen magazine, visit the Women’s Media Center Press Center here.

For more information on Emma Stydahar and Carina Cruz’s meeting with Teen Vogue please visit ABC News here.

To join the movement and sign the petition visit change.org or click here.

Says Gloria, "Women's physical appearance and their sexuality is so often the first thing that you hear about, before you hear about what they believe about issues, or how they've voted on important legislation... We heard about Hillary's ankles, her turquoise pantsuit, we heard about her hair, we heard about her cleavage, but how much did we hear about what she really thought about the issues. That's the thing."

ARNN co-host Molly Paige responds, "That's true, you really never hear about Mitt Romney's ankles."

You can listen to the entire clip at ARNN's website.

Seventeen magazine, which in recent months has been inundated by pleas from teenage girls to publish photographs of models that don’t look touched up, said on Tuesday that it would be more transparent about its photo shoots and promised to “celebrate every kind of beauty.”

Ann Shoket, the magazine’s editor in chief, wrote in the editor’s letter in the August issue that the magazine had drafted what it called a Body Peace Treaty, after she heard from girls “who were concerned that we’d strayed from our promise to show real girls as they really are.”

For the full article, click here.

So said a backpack-wearing dad from New Paltz, N.Y., to his freckled son of about ten years old outside the Supreme Court this morning, minutes after the announcement to a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd that Chief Justice John Roberts had joined the court’s four liberal justices in upholding not only the Affordable Care for Act, but also the individual coverage mandate at its heart.

Press and demonstrators had begun to arrive at the Supreme Court before dawn. By the time I arrived at 9 A.M., there were enough reporters and sign-waving citizens on the scene that my mobile coverage was non-existent for a four-block radius around the building, leaving me dependent on the crowd for news and information.

The first person I saw as I arrived at the Court was a NARAL Pro-Choice America staffer, waiting a block away for more NARAL volunteers to arrive. Other women’s groups I’d see on the scene included the Feminist Majority Foundation, Planned Parenthood, Raising Women’s Voices, and surely others I missed in the throng. Women’s or feminist groups aren’t always in perfect alignment with the Obama administration, not even on the issue of healthcare reform (quite a few of us, for example, haven’t forgotten the way abortion patients were used as a bargaining chip in the process of getting the law passed), but nonetheless, women had too much at stake in seeing the ACA upheld not to turn out in force.

It’s often a point that is lost in the overwhelmingly male-dominated corporate media, but healthcare reform’s disproportionate impact on women makes it a tremendously gendered issue. Even without maternity care benefits, women pay a billion dollars a year more for insurance coverage due to “gender rating”—the industry term for discrimination against women. That such discrimination is now illegal under the ACA would be a win worth fighting for all by itself, but that’s far from the only way in which the law’s affirmation by the Supreme Court is extraordinarily good news for women.

Unfortunately, quite a few of the usual anti-feminist suspects had turned out at the court today too. Anti-Affordable Care Act protesters had gathered on the south end of the plaza. Many were Tea Partiers (about ten of whom in "Tea Party Patriots" shirts stood in a circle trying to gin up a crowd chant of “Obamacare is economic slavery!” to little avail; perhaps their supporters were more aware than those holding the megaphones that the only thing like slavery is slavery), but a very large number were anti-choice groups. Students for Life, Americans United for Life, Priests for Life, and the Christian Defense Coalition were very visible. Both before and after the ruling, speakers from these groups were conducting unadulterated anti-choice rallies. They’d come prepared with “hey hey, ho ho, Roe v Wade has got to go” and the whole nine misogynist yards. Many of the speakers were pushing the discredited yet apparently still-popular “Obamacare funds abortion” lie.

Anti-choice conflation of abortion and fixing a broken healthcare system is notable in two ways. The first is that it shows that anti-choicers are actually willing to throw three hundred million Americans under the bus in order to keep women in their place. (And no, not “three hundred million minus people with good health care,” since most people who end up in medical bankruptcy had insurance when they became ill. I mean three hundred million Americans: all of us.) The second is that it suggests the way the right will move forward in fighting the ACA now that the conservative Supreme Court failed them: relentless incrementalism. Non-Profit Quarterly wrote today that moving forward, we can expect that “Congress could enact additional mechanisms to chip chip chip away at health insurance reform.” And Mother Jones writes, "Having failed to annhiliate the law in its entirety, they will now attempt to rip it apart piece by piece." Sound familiar? NPQ drives the point home with its example: “the House Appropriations Committee’s decision to ban federal government contracting with multi-state insurance plans that contain elective coverage of abortions.”

Clearly, obstructionism and an onslaught of small attacks is the way the American right fights a big law that grants freedoms that it doesn’t like. We’ll see more of that against the Affordable Care Act, starting first thing tomorrow morning. I suppose that’s democracy, or something like it. But until then, it felt pretty good to see that dad from New Paltz hug his son—who will be able to stay on his dad’s health plan until the age of 26 without fear of being dropped when he gets sick and actually needs to use his insurance—and say with a smile, “It’s the best ten dollars I ever lost.” And it felt pretty good today to have a reason to stand in the middle of a jostling, sweating, crowd and join in a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

The video below is shaky and loud and features a lot of footage of the backs of peoples' heads or the backs of peoples' signs--but if you want to know what it felt like to be in the crowd at the Supreme Court when the Affordable Care Act was upheld, this is it:

The scholars, from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, submitted a draft of their findings to a room that included the commissioner of the FCC, the independent review panel, and about eighty members of the public.  The three core questions of their research were the following:

1. How do Americans meet critical information needs?
2. How does the media ecosystem operate to address critical information needs?
3. What barriers exist in providing content and services to address critical information needs?

All of these are great research questions but ultimately, the scholars chose to focus the bulk of their discussion on communities and what their basic informational needs are.  The panel of scholars acknowledged that the media landscape in the United States is changing rapidly, often referring to “traditional media” as television newscasts and print media and “new media” as mostly social media, like Twitter and Facebook.  They also pointed out the fact that U.S. demographics are changing dramatically as well; the 2010 Census reports that by 2040, the U.S. will have a “majority minority” population.  The panel brought up both of these topics throughout their discussion to highlight the ways in which they mutually affect one another and also, how they affect different communities and their ability to access critical information.  It was also during this discussion where they brought up diversity.  The scholars stated that they wanted to change what our idea of diversity is but, unfortunately, they didn’t really offer any concrete examples on how we could do that.  I think they missed a great opportunity here to continue their discussion on how the U.S. will soon be a “majority minority” nation and how that can allow us to identify more barriers to media ownership and representations and also change the way our current, and future, multicultural communities will receive critical information. 

Another thing I found interesting was that the researchers only focused on “traditional media” in their research.  The reason for this was because they stated that there was minimal research regarding “new media” and what was out there was mostly unreliable.  They also mentioned the well-known fact that women and people of color are heavily underrepresented in “traditional” media, both in ownership of media outlets and in media representations.  This is where I think they may have shortchanged their research; if you leave out “new media” outlets then you are thereby leaving out all the women and people of color who currently have ownership roles and also, all of the diverse content and representations that are being produced. 

What left me feeling positive was the knowledge that their research was still in draft form.  We at the WMC hope that they may be able to focus more on “new media” platforms because it is there that we can find more women and people of color in ownership positions and more diverse representations as well. 

For more information regarding ownership and representations of women in the media, check out our 2012 Status of Women in the U.S. Media report.

You can also read the Women's Media Center's statement that was released in advance of Tuesday's FCC hearing: "WMC Calls on FCC to Address Underrepresentation of Women, People of Color Media Owners."

It’s a popular question: What person, dead or alive, would you most like to meet?

Thanks to the cover article of the June 4 issue of Time magazine, Lenore Romney may be rising to the top of many lists, especially among those of us keen to see more women enter politics.

In 1970, Romney was the GOP nominee seeking to unseat Sen. Phil Hart (D-MI). According to Barton Gellman’s article, she ran at a time “when women in politics still released their glove and shoe sizes.” On the campaign trail, when asked why she was not at home with her family, Romney would quip, “Well, I’ve already churned the butter for today.”

And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just look at the coverage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wearing headbands or going “au naturel.” Or skim the story on former GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s fingernails. Or think back to the last presidential election, when pundits wondered who’d stay at home with Sarah Palin’s children. Male candidates don’t get questions about their family obligations or their latest haircut, but women  are not only asked—they’re expected to answer.

Discussions of a candidate’s appearance or home life are just distractions. We need to focus instead on the underrepresentation of women in American politics. Compared with other nations, we are far behind. Currently, women hold just 17 percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress and 22 percent of the seats in state legislatures. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) and Running Start are trying to close the gap through our Elect Her initiative, which trains college women to run for student government and future office. With women making up the majority of students on college campuses, we must encourage them to break the gender leadership gap and be our leaders of tomorrow.

At AAUW, we’re doing our part by connecting women from around the country at our National Conference for College Women Student Leaders. Held earlier this month, these college women met trailblazers such as Lilly Ledbetter and Sandra Fluke, who inspired them to speak out when they see injustice. And now that all eyes are turned on Michigan and state Rep. Lisa Brown, I can only hope that women across the nation will be emboldened to get involved in the political process – not just to honor our foremothers, but to make sure we build a better world for our daughters and granddaughters.

The Time article reports that after ending her campaign, Romney said, “It’s the most humiliating thing I know of to run for office.” And that was before Hustler and Photoshop. Despite the devoted support of her family—son Mitt visited all 83 counties in the state of Michigan on her behalf—the process scarred Lenore Romney. She told a friend that she hoped to someday be up to working on another candidate’s campaign, but, she cautioned, “He will have to be awfully good.”

Change is coming, and it’s thanks to women like Lenore Romney that we’ve come this far. But it’s up to us to finish the job. It’s up to us to challenge the old guard with new ideas and the new faces needed to advance them. Mitt Romney gained the courage and experience to run for office from both of his parents—that’s the kind of legacy we need to pass along to our daughters as well as our sons.

We need to share more stories of women stepping up and speaking out for political change. And we need more men to support their mothers, daughters, and wives who want to run. Ask them to run for office and support them like Mitt Romney did his mother. Silencing women doesn’t work; let’s give them a megaphone.

On the day before the conference proper, we had been invited to attend the first-ever Netroots Women Connect event, a gathering of seventy or so political women for a day-long strategy session about what it means to play offense, both politically and culturally, in this moment of breathtaking hostility toward women as full participants in American life. The event was jointly organized by the Netroots Foundation and the Women Donors Network. Jen Ancona, who is on staff at WDN and a member of the Netroots Foundation board, created a Netroots Women Connect Storify to recap our very full day of strategizing, building bridges, and woman-powered troublemaking.

We were also honored to be a part of two truly fantastic panels during the main conference. In the first breakout session of the first day, Carol was on the "Women Rule: Keys for Social Media and Electoral Success" panel, along with Anita Sarah Jackson of MomsRising.org and WMC Progressive Women's Voices alums Veronica Arreola of Viva la Feminista and Joanne Bamberger of PunditMom.

On Saturday morning, Lauren participated in the "Safeguarding Democracy: Innovations in Technology and Human Rights" panel, alongside WITNESS' Matisse Bustos Hawkes, Be Bold Media's Sabrina Hersi Issa, Digital Democracy's Emily Jacobi, & moderator Caitlin Howarth, a Roosevelt Institute fellow.

After her panel, Lauren was also interviewed live on Take Action News With David Shuster on We Act Radio.

We also livetweeted the genuinely inspiring "2012 and the War on (and for) Women" keynote, featuring Democratic Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Hawaii Senate candidate Mazie Hirono, and Democratic Congressional candidate Darcy Burner of Washington's 1st District. Progressive Women's Voices alum Amanda Terkel of the Huffington Post moderated.

Another noteworthy panel (for which we were in the audience, but giving our overworked thumbs a rest) was "Behind the Camera: Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Media and Culture." Speakers were Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, Elana Levin of Advomatic, ThinkProgress blogger Alyssa Rosenberg, and video game designer and writer Alli Thrasher, and theirs was a most satisfying panel even before the Q&A period's bracing dispatch of a question with a deeply anti-feminist premise from a conservative blogger, via a cameo appearance by WAM!'s Jaclyn Friedman.

Cristal and I were also invited to a breakfast hosted by Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, for a small group of advocates in the online space, to exchange ideas about what online advocacy for women's health looks like going forward in such a polarized environment. Cecile opened by speaking of the ways in which Planned Parenthood and its netroots supports could build on the unprecedented success of February's intense, people-powered four-day online advocacy campaign to persuade the Susan G. Komen foundation to restore funding to Planned Parenthood for the breast health services it provides, primarily to low-income women. The conversation then turned to Mitt Romney's extreme positions on matters of women's health: "John McCain is a mainstream moderate compared to Romney on women's issues." As Cecile pointed out, Mitt Romney is on the record as saying Griswold v Connecticut was wrongly decided—that was the Supreme Court that granted married couples the legal right to contraception, way back in 1964. As for Senator McCain? Well, he's one of the few GOP Senators supporting Sen Jeanne Shaheen's push to grant abortion access to raped military women.

There were so many more women-centric panels (youth reproductive health/rights/justice; feminist comedy; sexual freedom; 'Ask a Sista') and parties (EMILY's List; Center for Reproductive Rights; WAM!) that we ran ourselves ragged trying to hit them all, and still be a part of panels and events hosted by our LGBT, labor, and POC allies, among so many others.

But no regrets, not a one: as Darcy Burner said in the moments after her keynote's moving request that all those willing to stand with women who'd exercised their right to abortion rise and be recognized as allies to those women: "This is how we change the stories in people's heads."

We come together; we stand together.

And then we fly home to collapse for fourteen hours into exhausted, happy sleep, all the while dreaming dreams of a world of justice, compassion and equal opportunity for all.

Click here to find out more.

For a more detailed account of the evening, here is some of the media coverage our event garnered:

The Wall Street Journal: Charging Ahead to Toast a Friend

Velvet Roper: Feminists Swoon Over Chace Crawford at Jane Fonda’s Peace, Love & Misunderstanding Premiere

Interview: GIRL POWER AT THE PEACE LOVE & MISUNDERSTANDING PREMIERE

Showbiz 411: Jane Fonda’s Movie Renaissance Is Thriving at 74

Movie Line: A Not So Hippie Premiere of Peace, Love & Misunderstanding in New York

CozyCot: 'peace, love, & misunderstanding' new york screening at moma where: new york city, usa.

Gossip Central: Jane Fonda: More Than the Sum of her Parts

And check out Feministing's Chloe Angyal discussing the film's feminism in the Atlantic.