Brie Larson’s New Netflix Film Tackles Sexism in Internet Startups

Brie Larson is best known at the moment for portraying Captain Marvel in the upcoming superhero movie (out next month on International Women's Day), but she's also set to portray a real-life hero in a movie highlighting gender discrimination in entrepreneurship. Click through to read more about women entrepreneurs at the center of the story, their company, the discrimination they faced, and Larson's involvement in the project.

By Saqib Shah

Brie Larson is set to star in a Netflix movie that highlights startup sexism as part of a two-film deal with the streaming service. Lady Business is based on a Fast Company article about two female entrepreneurs who invented a fake male cofounder in order to be taken seriously in the patriarchal business world.

Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer spoke of how they'd faced condescension from male developers when launching their weird art e-commerce site 'Witchsy." But that all changed when the fictional "Keith Mann" was magicked into existence. "It was like night and day," Dwyer told Fast Company in 2017. "It would take me days to get a response, but Keith could not only get a response and a status update, but also be asked if he wanted anything else or if there was anything else that Keith needed help with."

Fast forward to today, and Silicon Valley is still grappling with gender discrimination and harassment issues. In 2018, Google employees forced the tech giant to update its sexual misconduct policies after staging mass protests. And Uber agreed to pay 56 employees a total of $1.9 million for harassment claims.

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Image credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Why Hollywood Doesn't Tell More Stories for—and About—Girls

theatlantic.com - My two best friends and I were three lonely children growing up in the ’90s without siblings for playmates. We eventually found each other, but we also found comfort and adventure in a spate of intelligent films about girls like us—heroines of non-franchised stories set in the real world rather than a computer-generated one. There was Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, Sara Crewe of A Little Princess, Fiona in The Secret of Roan Inish, and the protagonists of Matilda, Harriet the Spy, Fly Away Home, The Parent Trap, and Ponette. These girls were too young for love triangles or battling dystopian forces. Their stories and conflicts varied, but they served to eventually reveal certain qualities: resilience, imagination, audacity, and compassion.

Another thing these films have in common is that they came out decades ago. Today’s audiences rarely see movies like The Secret Garden and Matilda—live-action works for and about younger girls that celebrate the ambition and resourcefulness of their protagonists. For studios, big-budget sequels and reboots and remakes dominate the day. Kids’ movies as a whole are usually animated and/or feature protagonists who are a bit older (or four-legged). Combine that with other systemic problems like outdated ideas about gender and marketing, as well as a dearth of female writers and directors, and the result is a cinematic landscape for girls that’s in some ways less rich today than it was 20 years ago.

Though modern films with boy protagonists are also increasingly animated (Big Hero 6, Sanjay’s Super Team), there are still a few live-action options with young heroes who use ingenuity and courage to solve problems (Pan, The Jungle Book). But within the broader context of storytelling, toys, and costumes for children, boys have traditionally been permitted to fill a wide range of exciting roles (pirates, superheroes, ninjas, astronauts). Girls, meanwhile, tend to be slotted into a narrower range of character types (princesses chief among them), making it that much more valuable when films present alternatives young female viewers can relate to. The problem is even worse for young girls of color, who historically haven’t seen many images of themselves on screen, animated or otherwise (though films like the upcoming Moana seem to offer some hope that might change for the better).

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New Film Production Company Focuses on Female Empowerment

An exciting new venture is in the works from leading ladies on screen—and leading female empowerment voices in movies and television. We Can Do It Together is a non-profit production company working with leading voices in the industry—both male and female—to elevate the profiles of women and other marginalized groups in movies and other forms of media. The advisory board includes Jessica Chastain, Queen Latifah, Juliette Binoche, Catherine Hardwicke, and other powerful women in the film and television industries.

The non-profit company will announce its first project at Cannes in May, and we'll be watching with great interest.

The Hollywood Reporter - A new non-profit production company called We Do It Together has been launched with a focus on female empowerment in films, TV and other forms of media.

The new banner comes with a star-studded advisory board that includes Jessica Chastain, Queen Latifah, Juliette Binoche, Freida Pinto, Catherine Hardwicke, Amma Asante, Małgorzata Szumowska, Marielle Heller, Ziyi Zhang, Haifaa Al Mansour, and Katia Lund.

The venture plans to work with male and female internationally acclaimed directors, actors, and producers to develop a slate of gender-led films, and help create opportunities for emerging voices within the industry.

The news of the company's formation comes on the heels of a year focused on the gender disparity in the industry, which led to an investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Read more here.

Diversity in filmmaking: How ‘Reel Grrls’ empowers young women who have something to say

Film making is an ideal medium for telling diverse stories--but the industry continues to be dominated by straight, white men, and many young women and girls hesitate to pursue movie making. One organization has been working for nearly 15 years to combat that. Seattle-based Reel Grrls, which may expand out of the state in the near future, uses volunteer and paid mentors and teachers to show the ropes of film making to girls middle-school-age and up. As the girls grow comfortable with the technology and build confidence, it also battles another long-held bias--that girls and women are not as good with tech as boys and men.

The nonprofit is empowering girls to tell their own stories, insightful works ranging from silly to serious, and is creating a twofold pipeline to improve the situation: More girls behind the camera now means more women behind the camera in the years and generations to come; and with girls and young women telling stories, the media we all consume will start to tell a more diverse--and representative--story.

The organization focuses on educating and empowering girls and LGBT individuals, and works to build a network, making connections in the video and film industries. They teach classes including vlogging, editing, storytelling, sharing strategies and more. Click through to learn more.

geekwire.com - The video recording and editing capabilities of smartphones and tablets have made it easier than ever for would-be filmmakers to create all manner of videos. And yet the world of movie-making is still overwhelmingly dominated by white, straight men.

At least for now.

Seattle’s Reel Grrls is working to empower young women and LBGT youth to find their voice in filmmaking and learn to use everything from simple smartphone technology to high-production cinematic tools.

With the help of Reel Grrls, youth are discovering “my voice is important and I have the skills and technology available to me,” said Malory Graham, who founded the nonprofit in 2001. They realize that they have something essential to say and that no one else can say it as well as they can.

“They’re making their own media,” Graham said. “And that’s going to change the face of the media we see.”

For many, that change would be welcome. Sunday’s Academy Awards drew criticism and boycotts by movie stars upset by the absence of black, Hispanic and other non-white awards nominees. And a university study released last week measured the lack of women, racial minorities and LBGT people in movies, TV and digital series — both behind the camera and in front of it.

Read more here.