Ask Her Something Different

Brace yourselves, it’s about to get cringey:  At an Avengers Press Conference in 2012, a reporter asked Robert Downey Jr. how he approached the role of Tony Stark.  Then, she asked Scarlett Johansson if she changed her diet to play Black Widow.

If you rolled your eyes, then you might understand where I’m going with this.  I’m Hannah McKenna, and I’m going to talk about how reporters cut women down to their looks and personal lives more than they do with men.

The Representation Project is an organization that fights gender stereotypes in the media.  Their studies showthat on average, women are twice as likely to be asked what they are wearing at the Oscars than men. This doesn’t just apply to women in film.  The University of Cambridge searched the Sports Corpus database, which has millions of athletic reports from different media outlets.  The database can show you common word associations used in these reports, and for female athletes the most frequently used words were ‘aged’, ‘older’, ‘married’, ‘unmarried’, and ‘pregnant’, while men had ‘fastest’, ‘strong’, and ‘big’. 

These reports shouldn’t be about looks or personal life, they should be about career. As future communicators, it is important that we make relevant reports on the work these women do and not on their figures.  To quote Robert Downey Jr. from that Avengers press conference, “…people are much more interested in your second question to Scarlett…”