Thank You Constance thank you Tom thank you very much I sound great when they talk about me so bye my sincere thanks to the governors for this this incredible honor I'm very very grateful and I promise I won't let it go to my head because I think I'm pretty much the same you know a small town goofy gal that I always was it's it's so funny because I was just talking about this with the the driver in the motorcade on the way over here it's funny so so one day several months ago I was shocked
to get a flurry of texts telling me that I needed to call John Bailey immediately so I got a little worried that that perhaps I had committed some Academy crime but to find out that it was like this always was really really wonderful I love being part of our industry and I have so much passion for acting it's my joy in life and I've also been passionate about empowering women as you heard and girls in part by seeking roles that I think might resonate with them in some way in fact I have only played role
models what all right so I wasn't a movie called earth girls are easy this was very early on I think we put that one title aside you can take me seriously the film that actually changed my life was Thelma and Louise it it really did and it made me realize in a very powerful way how few opportunities we give women to come out of a movie feeling excited and empowered by the female characters and this led me to have a very profound interest in the way girls and women are depicted in the world so years
later when my daughter Alizee was a toddler that spidey-sense led me to notice that there should be far more male characters and female characters in media made for young kids really I thought surely by now we should be showing kids that boys and girls share the sandbox equally but when I started talking to content creators about it to a person they said oh no no no that's been fixed and they felt a responsibility they were serious they felt a responsibility to do right by girls and they thought they were so how could that be how
could the people creating content not be aware of how bereft of female presence their creations were so now I realized I needed the data and it turns out that the message that we are sending is that men and boys are far more valuable to us than women and girls there's just one small example if you look at the occupations of characters in film 81 percent of the characters with jobs are male and the number of women in top professions are profoundly underrepresented even compared to the low real life stats so in other words however abysmal
the numbers are in real life it's far worse in fiction where you make it up can be anything you want and we make it worse than the crappy reality people cat characterized us Hollywood types as bleeding-heart liberals LGBTQ and diversity champions and all that hardly if we were supposed to be a bunch of gender-fluid intersectional feminist then by God let's do it up right let's live up to our label live up to our stereotype do we really want to stand by the idea that it's fine for female characters to be one-dimensional narrowly stereotyped hyper sexualized
or simply not there at all so this is why I choke us I chose to focus on what kids see first it's just common sense don't create a problem that you have to try to solve later on think about how dramatically different our world would be if we hadn't all grown up with these unconscious biases and I also want to be clear I'm not talking about making the lead character a female don't come away thinking hey you know maybe someday I'll I'll consider making a female lead film what I'm saying is whatever you're working on
right now everything that you're working on right now boost the female population and one of the quickest ways in my opinion to reach gender parity is to go through a script that you're already going to make and cross out a bunch of first names and of ensemble characters and supporting characters and make them female and with one stroke you have created some non stereotyped characters who might turn out to be even more interesting now that they've had a gender swap it's simple and then cast me seriously seriously I mean humanitarian yeah yes but here's the
thing [Laughter] [Applause] I'm just is is there a reason it can't also benefit me personally let's go so here's my theory of change nearly every sector of our society has a huge gender disparity problem but there's one category of gross gender inequality where the under-representation of women can be fixed absolutely overnight on screen let's make this change happen right now tomorrow morning look at the projects are working on and do a gender and diversity pass don't make one more movie without doing that first tape a sign their office wall that says no more missed opportunities
let's do this okay thank you very much [Applause]
