The Dilemma Of Women In Film

I came across this recently on Facebook:

Hollywood movies write women out of the script & create a make-believe world where men do all jobs.Ace chart pic.twitter.com/0eM17kRJKW

— paulkirby (@paul1kirby) September 10, 2015

Several points there. First, Hollywood's entire business is about constructed realities. While I couldn't find the source material here — neither FiveThirtyEight.com nor Google turn up this graph — someone is getting their panties in a bunch over the number of men vs. women onscreen? So what? The obvious rejoinder would be, well, MONAYZ:

Using Bechdel test data, we analyzed 1,615 films released from 1990 to 2013 to examine the relationship between the prominence of women in a film and that film’s budget and gross profits. We found that the median budget of movies that passed the test — those that featured a conversation between two women about something other than a man — was substantially lower than the median budget of all films in the sample. What’s more, we found that the data doesn’t appear to support the persistent Hollywood belief that films featuring women do worse at the box office. Instead, we found evidence that films that feature meaningful interactions between women may in fact have a better return on investment, overall, than films that don’t.

So it seems possible that there are two effects here (at least!):

1. Films passing the Bechdel test have better return on investment.
2. They also have lower budgets.

 The second point suggests studios are unwilling to make the sorts of budgetary mistakes on such films they more readily do on other sorts of films, i.e. there is a kind of discipline involved in making character-driven stories that does not attach to, say, cop buddy pictures or action-adventure films. If the second point drives the first, it points to the Bechdel test as a sign, not a cause.

The way forward is unclear, at best; losing money in Hollywood is axiomatic, and informs their rapacious accounting. It does not seem likely, for the reason that film making is both a business and an art, that producers or investors will be particularly eager to have a mechanistic version of the NFL's Rooney Rule, as proposed by Stacy L. Smith in the Hollywood Reporter; accounting for every person onscreen rings of the old Communist art machine that demanded conformance to socialist realism, whatever that meant. If advocates like Geena Davis want films with more women in them, go her; and let her also finance them and take the risks such necessarily entail. Telling others how to run their lives without taking that risk is the first sign of a fraud. Yet there may well be entirely sound commercial reasons for changing the status quo.

Bechdel By Other Means

I recently encountered an essay about an attempt at making a separate-but-equal programming test analogous to the famous Bechdel Test inspired by a tweet from Laurie Voss:

Does your project pass the Bechdel test? To pass, a function written by a woman dev must call a function written by another woman dev.
— Laurie Voss (@seldo) February 27, 2015

I confess that this is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard in my life, and yet another sign that Slashdot, whence I got it, is increasingly overrun with Social Justice Warrior types and thus jumping sharks with metronomic regularity. In all this raving about female underrepresentation in tech fields, a persistently missing perspective is that of the employer, i.e. why should a woman make a more appealing choice than a man for a particular job? Just as Jackie Robinson represented a means for the Dodgers to acquire low-cost "amateur" talent as first movers, there has to be a motivation for employers to hire women. That should be the case if the "77 cents on the dollar" factoid were true; no rational employer would throw away that kind of advantage, and should stock their cubicles with women almost exclusively. Yet it doesn't happen, and it's hard to conclude otherwise than that there's some underlying reasons for it, such as a preference for fewer hours and more time spent at home. This exact trend animates Sweden's labor market, which (along with the other Scandinavian countries) is one of the most sexually segregated. That is to say, it is a direct consequence of choices women make that their feminist "betters" expressly reject.

Consider, in this regard, the gender disparities in engineering. An article on the Wharton School website laments the paucity of women engineers and holds up China and Russia as superior examples of equity. According to the post, "In China, 40 percent of engineers are women, and in the former USSR, women accounted for 58 percent of the engineering workforce." The author blames workplace biases and stereotypes for the fact that women in the United States earn only 20 percent of the doctoral degrees in engineering. But perhaps American women earn fewer degrees in engineering because they don't have to. They have more opportunities to pursue careers that really interest them. American women may be behind men in engineering, but they now earn a majority of all Ph.Ds and outnumber men in humanities, biology, social sciences, and health sciences. Despite 40 years of consciousness-raising and gender-neutral pronouns, most men and women still gravitate to different fields and organize their lives in different ways. Women in countries like Sweden, Norway and Iceland enjoy elaborate supportive legislation, yet their vocational preferences and family priorities are similar to those of American women.

Instead of worrying about whether module X engages function Y based on the sex of the author, shouldn't we be more concerned about whether the damn thing works as designed? Acolytes of the cult of Ada Lovelace never have much interest in providing value to the end customer, or even asking how meeting their demands would result in customer value. There is in programming no female analogue to either the Negro Leagues, the color line, or Jackie Robinson, i.e. employers are free to hire women, and in fact do so. Such data as we do have suggests women choose not to enter the field in the first place — which is not the fault of employers or coworkers. In the absence of actual polling data, proof by repeated assertion and hyperbolic conclusion-assuming is all we have, and nowhere close to conclusive. In fact, it represents the same kind of willful reality denial we see in the many feminist "rape" studies that insist on answering important questions for women rather than asking them directly: there's a justifiable fear in the questioner that the "right" answer won't come back often enough.