Recently, one of the popular blogs that I read, kottke.org,
featured a post pointing to Pixar’s gendar gap. The basis of the post was
in highlighting that there is a gap in the amount of female protagonists in
Pixar movies vs the amount of male protagonists. The author mentions that there
are potentially several reasons for this gap, one reason being that there are
mostly men working in the animation department at Pixar as well as mostly men
working in the animation field in general. Thus they are creating stories that
relate to the problems and issues that these men face in their day to day
lives. One can easily see how this directly corresponds to the fact that there
are fewer women in the tech field overall (including the animation portion of
the field).
The problems with this state of things are
obvious. Having less female protagonists in popular children's’ movies means
that our young females have less examples of strong female role models to model
their behaviour after. This helps to feed into the cycle of less women
believing that they can be successful in a male dominated field such as the
tech field. If our young females don’t have more strong role models on the big
screens, and in the tech offices, then they too will not have the confidence to
join the world of tech.
It’s obvious that we cannot directly fix Pixar’s
gender gap. However, I believe that we can use it for inspiration. We should
look to it to inspire us to join the tech field, up the female representation
there, and thus create more positive, strong, tech based female role models for
the younger generations to look up to. We should use it as an inspiration to
follow our hearts and have confidence in ourselves and enter the tech field and
exceed our own expectations.
I think by using this article, as well as the
many others we see as inspiration for making ourselves better female tech role
models, we will start to see the numbers shift in a positive way. Companies
like Pixar will have more females creating the stories, and this will help
balance out the gender gap. And, as this gender gap gets balanced our across
the tech industry, we can finally realize that we not only below in the tech
industry, but that we are an integral part of it.
Links
Kottke.org: http://www.kottke.org
Pixar’s gender gap: http://kottke.org/11/05/pixars-gender-gap
Lis
Info:
Website: www.elisabethhubert.com
Twitter: @lishubert
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elisabethhubert
