The ‘Golden Age for Women in TV’ Is Actually a Rerun
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CreditKiersten Essenpreis
Los Angeles — NOT long ago, I recommended a young woman for a job in late-night TV and when we met face to face to celebrate her getting hired, we made a charming discovery: She was born in 1987, the same year that I got my first job on a late night show.
Our talk turned to next Sunday’s Emmy Awards, and we shared our excitement that Amy Schumer received multiple nominations and that two of the seven shows nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series were created by women: Tina Fey’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (created with Robert Carlock) and Jill Soloway’s “Transparent.”
“We’re living in a golden age of women in comedy,” my friend gushed.
I nodded and asked whether she thought female creators would ever make up half of the comedy series nominations. Her smile froze.
“Well, I don’t know about that …”
I do. Because it happened a quarter of a century ago. In 1990, Susan Harris’s “The Golden Girls,” Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s “Designing Women” and Diane English’s “Murphy Brown” squared off for Outstanding Comedy Series. “Cheers” and “The Wonder Years” rounded out the field, and when the envelope was opened, I was sitting in the audience cheering as they announced “Murphy Brown.”
As a newly hired writer on “Late Night With David Letterman,” I was kindly invited to tag along to the Emmys even though I wasn’t a nominee. I felt a little nervous because no one told me if I was supposed to go onstage if the show won, but it turned out to be moot. The “Late Night” writing staff lost to a tie between a Billy Crystal special and “The Tracey Ullman Show,” whose staff of 11 writers included four women. (In comparison, “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” debuted last week with 19 credited writers, only two of whom are female.)
Women were on a roll that night in 1990, but it didn’t seem like I was witnessing a golden age. It just seemed obvious that women could compete at the highest levels of comedy and win. Only decades later did I realize it was a spike, not a trend.
Like leggings, comedies created by women came into vogue in the late 1980s, exploded in the early ’90s, went mainstream in the mid-90s and were shoved into the back of the closet around 1997. It took another decade before the next show solely created by a woman — Tina Fey’s “30 Rock” — made it back into the elite Emmy inner circle. Perhaps not coincidentally, leggings made a comeback around the same time.
Still, the rebound has been wobbly. A recent Variety article trumpeted an “unprecedented” number of female showrunners, while also reporting that in 2013-14, only 15.1 percent of executive producer credits went to women, “down noticeably from 18.6 percent in the 2011-12 season.” That sounds less like a march to equality and more like a moonwalk, giving the illusion of forward motion when, in fact, the dancer is sliding backward. Progress for female directors has been even more elusive, which has prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to seek an industrywide investigation.
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Still, whenever I mention that continuing gender imbalance in the entertainment industry, I’m met with two responses: One: Tina Fey. And two: It’s getting better, right?
To answer the first: Yes, Ms. Fey’s monumental career has matched her monumental talents. But one individual’s success does not translate to an entire class. (See Obama, Barack; re: racism.) The narrative of “woman as phenomenon” has persisted since TV started. Long before Ms. Fey’s birth, Gertrude Berg created, wrote, produced and starred in the long-running hit “The Goldbergs.” She even nabbed the first Emmy for Best Actress in 1951. Thirty years ago, Susan Harris owned NBC’s Saturday night just as Shonda Rhimes now owns Thursday on ABC. There have always been women who were successful against the odds. Now we need to change the odds so more women can be successful.
As for the claim that things are getting better, the numbers fall short. This year’s Writers Guild of America West TV Staffing Brief showed that women’s share of employment has basically flatlined since 2001 and now hovers around 29 percent. The staffing share for minorities dropped to 13.7 percent after a peak of 15.6 percent during the 2011-12 season. The writing staffs for other types of programming, like late night, were even less welcoming to women, who held 18 percent of the staff positions, while minorities had only 3.5 percent.
Wishful thinking does nothing to solve the problem. In fact, it may make it worse. If you believe things are getting better, you won’t feel the need to do anything. And you certainly won’t feel the need to do anything now. If necessity is the mother of invention, urgency is the uncle of change. Without it, progress slows and then stops and then reverses.
In this sense, gender inequality resembles a bacterial infection two days into a 10-day course of antibiotics. The patient’s temperature may be down, but the Mayo Clinic’s website warns: “It is tempting to stop taking an antibiotic as soon as you feel better. But the full treatment is necessary to kill the disease-causing bacteria. Failure to do so can result in the need to resume treatment later.”
Gender inequality is still in our bloodstream, and when we stop fighting it, the bacteria multiply. We need aggressive treatment that leads to more than incremental progress.
I fantasize about the networks’ making a rule that each show’s writing staff needs to reflect the gender and racial makeup of its audience. So if the target viewership of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” measures around 56 percent female, the show’s current mix of three women and 16 or so men would require a major rebalance.
In every field and every industry, let’s agree that the goal is not just “getting better” but “getting equal.” And we might as well keep wearing leggings, just in case it turns out that they are the key.
COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, “elsewhere.”
These days, we feel less of a need to hide the fact that we are dividing our attention. In a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended. But they weren’t happy about it; 82 percent of adults felt that the way they used their phones in social settings hurt the conversation.
I’ve been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, I’ve had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk? I’ve looked at families, friendships and romance. I’ve studied schools, universities and workplaces. When college students explain to me how dividing their attention plays out in the dining hall, some refer to a “rule of three.” In a conversation among five or six people at dinner, you have to check that three people are paying attention — heads up — before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds, but with different people having their heads up at different times. The effect is what you would expect: Conversation is kept relatively light, on topics where people feel they can drop in and out.
Young people spoke to me enthusiastically about the good things that flow from a life lived by the rule of three, which you can follow not only during meals but all the time. First of all, there is the magic of the always available elsewhere. You can put your attention wherever you want it to be. You can always be heard. You never have to be bored. When you sense that a lull in the conversation is coming, you can shift your attention from the people in the room to the world you can find on your phone. But the students also described a sense of loss.
One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add “facts” to their conversation. “Daddy,” she said, “stop Googling. I want to talk to you.” A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”
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CreditYann Kebbi
It’s a powerful insight. Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us.
Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.
Of course, we can find empathic conversations today, but the trend line is clear. It’s not only that we turn away from talking face to face to chat online. It’s that we don’t allow these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones in the landscape.
In our hearts, we know this, and now research is catching up with our intuitions. We face a significant choice. It is not about giving up our phones but about using them with greater intention. Conversation is there for us to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.
The trouble with talk begins young. A few years ago, a private middle school asked me to consult with its faculty: Students were not developing friendships the way they used to. At a retreat, the dean described how a seventh grader had tried to exclude a classmate from a school social event. It’s an age-old problem, except that this time when the student was asked about her behavior, the dean reported that the girl didn’t have much to say: “She was almost robotic in her response. She said, ‘I don’t have feelings about this.’ She couldn’t read the signals that the other student was hurt.”
The dean went on: “Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like 8-year-olds. The way they exclude one another is the way 8-year-olds would play. They don’t seem able to put themselves in the place of other children.”
One teacher observed that the students “sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones.” Is this the new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. The old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.
But we are resilient. The psychologist Yalda T. Uhls was the lead author on a 2014 study of children at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without phones or tablets, these campers were able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped scenes significantly better than a control group. What fostered these new empathic responses? They talked to one another. In conversation, things go best if you pay close attention and learn how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. This is easier to do without your phone in hand. Conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do.
In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.I have seen this resilience during my own research at a device-free summer camp. At a nightly cabin chat, a group of 14-year-old boys spoke about a recent three-day wilderness hike. Not that many years ago, the most exciting aspect of that hike might have been the idea of roughing it or the beauty of unspoiled nature. These days, what made the biggest impression was being phoneless. One boy called it “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your friends.” The campers also spoke about their new taste for life away from the online feed. Their embrace of the virtue of disconnection suggests a crucial connection: The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude.
A VIRTUOUS circle links conversation to the capacity for self-reflection. When we are secure in ourselves, we are able to really hear what other people have to say. At the same time, conversation with other people, both in intimate settings and in larger social groups, leads us to become better at inner dialogue.
But we have put this virtuous circle in peril. We turn time alone into a problem that needs to be solved with technology. Timothy D. Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, led a team that explored our capacity for solitude. People were asked to sit in a chair and think, without a device or a book. They were told that they would have from six to 15 minutes alone and that the only rules were that they had to stay seated and not fall asleep. In one experiment, many student subjects opted to give themselves mild electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts.
People sometimes say to me that they can see how one might be disturbed when people turn to their phones when they are together. But surely there is no harm when people turn to their phones when they are by themselves? If anything, it’s our new form of being together.
But this way of dividing things up misses the essential connection between solitude and conversation. In solitude we learn to concentrate and imagine, to listen to ourselves. We need these skills to be fully present in conversation.
Every technology asks us to confront human values. This is a good thing, because it causes us to reaffirm what they are. If we are now ready to make face-to-face conversation a priority, it is easier to see what the next steps should be. We are not looking for simple solutions. We are looking for beginnings. Some of them may seem familiar by now, but they are no less challenging for that. Each addresses only a small piece of what silences us. Taken together, they can make a difference.
One start toward reclaiming conversation is to reclaim solitude. Some of the most crucial conversations you will ever have will be with yourself. Slow down sufficiently to make this possible. And make a practice of doing one thing at a time. Think of unitasking as the next big thing. In every domain of life, it will increase performance and decrease stress.
Our phones are not accessories, but psychologically potent devices that change not just what we do but who we are. A second path toward conversation involves recognizing the degree to which we are vulnerable to all that connection offers. We have to commit ourselves to designing our products and our lives to take that vulnerability into account. We can choose not to carry our phones all the time. We can park our phones in a room and go to them every hour or two while we work on other things or talk to other people. We can carve out spaces at home or work that are device-free, sacred spaces for the paired virtues of conversation and solitude. Families can find these spaces in the day to day — no devices at dinner, in the kitchen and in the car. Introduce this idea to children when they are young so it doesn’t spring up as punitive but as a baseline of family culture. In the workplace, too, the notion of sacred spaces makes sense: Conversation among employees increases productivity.But doing one thing at a time is hard, because it means asserting ourselves over what technology makes easy and what feels productive in the short term. Multitasking comes with its own high, but when we chase after this feeling, we pursue an illusion. Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.
We can also redesign technology to leave more room for talking to each other. The “do not disturb” feature on the iPhone offers one model. You are not interrupted by vibrations, lights or rings, but you can set the phone to receive calls from designated people or to signal when someone calls you repeatedly. Engineers are ready with more ideas: What if our phones were not designed to keep us attached, but to do a task and then release us? What if the communications industry began to measure the success of devices not by how much time consumers spend on them but by whether it is time well spent?
It is always wise to approach our relationship with technology in the context that goes beyond it. We live, for example, in a political culture where conversations are blocked by our vulnerability to partisanship as well as by our new distractions. We thought that online posting would make us bolder than we are in person, but a 2014 Pew study demonstrated that people are less likely to post opinions on social media when they fear their followers will disagree with them. Designing for our vulnerabilities means finding ways to talk to people, online and off, whose opinions differ from our own.
Sometimes it simply means hearing people out. A college junior told me that she shied away from conversation because it demanded that one live by the rigors of what she calls the “seven minute rule.” It takes at least seven minutes to see how a conversation is going to unfold. You can’t go to your phone before those seven minutes are up. If the conversation goes quiet, you have to let it be. For conversation, like life, has silences — what some young people I interviewed called “the boring bits.” It is often in the moments when we stumble, hesitate and fall silent that we most reveal ourselves to one another.
This attitude can show up in friendship as a lack of empathy. Friendships become things to manage; you have a lot of them, and you come to them with tools. So here is a first step: To reclaim conversation for yourself, your friendships and society, push back against viewing the world as one giant app. It works the other way, too: Conversation is the antidote to the algorithmic way of looking at life because it teaches you about fluidity, contingency and personality.The young woman who is so clear about the seven minutes that it takes to see where a conversation is going admits that she often doesn’t have the patience to wait for anything near that kind of time before going to her phone. In this she is characteristic of what the psychologists Howard Gardner and Katie Davis called the “app generation,” which grew up with phones in hand and apps at the ready. It tends toward impatience, expecting the world to respond like an app, quickly and efficiently. The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable results.
This is our moment to acknowledge the unintended consequences of the technologies to which we are vulnerable, but also to respect the resilience that has always been ours. We have time to make corrections and remember who we are — creatures of history, of deep psychology, of complex relationships, of conversations, artless, risky and face to face.
