(cheering)
COURIC: Hi Ladies, give me a cheer!
-Yes we can, yes we can!
COURIC: What a year.
-My body My rights!
COURIC: Women taking to the streets.
What concrete things are you hoping will result from this movement?
-Fair working conditions, fair pay standards.
COURIC: Speaking out.
OPRAH: A new day is on the horizon!
PORTMAN: And here are the all-male nominees.
COURIC: And demanding action.
HAYEK: Time's up!
COURIC: Suddenly Hollywood and Silicon Valley are in the crosshairs.
And not just over the issue of harassment.
LAWRENCE: On average women are paid 21% less than men.
DAVIS: We're not all on, the same playing field.
We're just not.
-Why are there so few female directors in Hollywood?
MOSS: I don't know why, except for it to be sexist.
COURIC: Beyond Me Too and Time's Up, I wanted to know, why are women still so stuck?
BAKER: I got to the tech industry and asked if I was part of the cleaning crew.
COURIC: So I went on a journey to understand the problem.
How bad is it?
SWISHER: It's bad.
COURIC: Why it matters.
DAVIS: The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she
has in life, and the more hours a boy watches, the more sexist his views become.
COURIC: And meet the women.
Have you ever punched anyone in the nose?
COURIC: On the frontlines of the revolt.
-Action!
COURIC: In America Inside Out.
(theme music playing)
Rarely has a show captured the zeitgeist like The Handmaid's Tale.
-Blessed be the fruit. -May the Lord open.
COURIC: Women, defiant. Standing up for each other.
And for themselves.
The setting, a dystopian America where women have completely lost their rights
and men are fully in charge.
-I'd like to play a game with you.
COURIC: At an explosive political moment.
-Rise and resist!
COURIC: When women are taking to the streets,
The Handmaid's Tale has definitely touched a nerve.
And the birthplace of this small screen revolution?
2500 miles from Hollywood.
So welcome to beautiful Toronto, which is kind of hard to tell from this parking lot.
But it's also hard to imagine that inside this big, massive warehouse looking building,
they're creating a brave new world for women in showbiz.
Praise be.
Blessed be the fruit.
The Commander's office is in there.
I want to play Scrabble with him.
The show is a sharp rebuke to the entrenched sexism that has permeated
the entertainment industry for decades.
-Let's roll sound. 73 Take 1.
And action!
COURIC: Women may be more than half the population, but according to the latest data,
less than a third of all speaking roles were female.
Behind the scenes, it's even worse.
Last year only 7% of movies and one-fifth of TV shows were directed by women.
Another study found that 80% of
high powered entertainment executives are men.
But the set of The Handmaid's Tale
is absolutely teeming with estrogen.
The cast is heavily female and women are well represented in almost every job,
from the writers' room, to the technical staff,
to the people shooting and directing the action.
-We'll go right into the next one which is Lizzy lens, one camera.
-I felt the baby kick for the first time, last night.
COURIC: More than half of the episodes have been directed by women.
For this one, Kari Skogland is calling the shots.
Why do you think the numbers are still so pathetic for
women in the entertainment business?
-The business is based on credits.
And if you don't have the credits, they don't wanna hire you.
-Sounds to me that you have to get that first big break in order
to get in your foot in the door.
-But you know what, as a male, you get to have promise and get the big break.
u don't even have to have the big break.
Whereas a female, you have to have proven yourself not once, not twice, but many times.
And, by the way, if you, if you falter, you don't fail up.
-Do you think that things are changing for the better?
-Of course, literally this show,
I would say is the cornerstone to the true final floodgates.
COURIC: Elisabeth Moss plays Offred.
-I had another name but it's forbidden now.
COURIC: And is an executive producer on the show.
You might remember her as precocious first daughter, Zoey Bartlet,
on The West Wing.
-I don't want this, Dad! -Zoey!
-Who are you? -I'm Peggy Olsen, the new girl.
COURIC: She later became a TV icon.
-Peggy can you get me some coffee?
-No.
COURIC: As Peggy Olsen, who transforms from a mousy secretary to a badass ad
agency exec in Mad Men.
ANISTON: And the Golden Globe goes to, Elisabeth Moss, Handmaid's Tale!
COURIC: She's established herself as a new kind of Hollywood powerhouse,
vocally, unapologetically feminist.
MOSS: We no longer live in the gaps between the stories.
We are the story in print and we are writing the story ourselves.
-Whoo, yay!
We caught up with Moss in LA, after she won not one, but two Golden Globes.
You demanded that you'd be an executive producer on this series.
-Yes, for me, at this point, I'm not gonna get involved in something that is going to be
using my face and my name and, and all of the hard work, and not have ownership over it.
-How important is it to have women behind the camera as directors?
-There's a sensibility that a woman brings, that is just different.
Women know that we are not just strong, we are not just vulnerable.
We are not just attractive or not attractive.
We are many things at once.
And we're able to see into that complexity.
-Why are there so few female directors in Hollywood?
-There are female directors in Hollywood.
But the studios or the people in charge, the people who do the hiring,
aren't hiring them.
And I don't know why, except for it to be sexist.
It's idiotic.
There's so many good choices out there.
COURIC: Moss relishes her new responsibilities but, like most women,
had to let go of the pressure to be liked.
-I've had to stand up for myself, or argue, or be difficult, or you know,
contradict someone.
We're so conditioned, as women, to believe that we have to be nice all the time,
we have to be polite.
-Accommodating. -Accommodating, exactly.
But I think in the end, you kind of have to just make a decision not to care whether
or not anyone thinks you're off-putting.
-Or thinks you're being a biatch.
-Exactly. Yes.
Men don't seem to care whether or not they, you know,
get a bad reputation or seem difficult or demanding.
So why should a woman?
COURIC: Actors like Jennifer Lawrence believe this so-called,
"disease to please," makes women unwilling to demand equal pay.
LAWRENCE: I feel uncomfortable asking for more money.
I don't want to seem like a brat.
I don't want to seem like all of these things that are only
words that are used for women.
COURIC: Last year, the ten top earning male actors made
nearly three times what the top ten earning women made.
But the three highest-grossing movies of the year all starred women.
MOSS: They pull in as much money at the box office.
They should be paid the same amount, if not more.
COURIC: This year's awards shows were dominated by female-led casts and stories.
MCDORMAND: If I may be so honored to have all the female nominees
in every category stand with me in this room tonight.
(applause).
COURIC: The feeling that something's gotta give was unmistakable.
But the pace of progress is painfully slow,
especially when you consider the last time we thought it was a turning point.
-Go, go! Go, go, go, go!
COURIC: After all, we've seen this movie before.
-When the press started predicting this changes everything, I was, like,
"Hot dog, yay!"
-And of course it didn't.
-No! Nothing changed.
get caught.
LOUISE: What you talking about?
THELMA: Go!
♪ ♪
-That actually makes me cry.
DAVIS: Aww. I've seen it so many times.
-Smile.
COURIC: Thelma & Louise was an unexpected hit, a genre-busting buddy movie
where the buddies just happened to be women.
-What was it like when that film came out in 1991, gosh, more than 25 years ago?
-Yeah, I know!
It was astounding because nobody expected it to have the reaction that it did.
-I just feel like I got a knack for this (bleep).
-I believe you do.
-When the press started predicting, this changes everything, I was, like,
"Hot dog, yay!"
-And of course it didn't.
-No! Nothing changed.
COURIC: Geena Davis has spent much of her career trying to change things,
especially after her daughter was born, 16 years ago.
-Imagination. -I started watching preschool shows with her.
I immediately noticed that there were far fewer female characters than male
characters in what we're making for little kids in the 21st Century.
I couldn't believe it!
I just canvassed Hollywood.
Every single person said, "Oh no. No. That used to be a problem.
That's not a problem anymore. We fixed it."
And that's when I had the idea of, I'll get the research and then be proven right.
COURIC: She did. And she was.
In 2004, Davis founded the Geena Davis Institute to research how women
and girls are represented on-screen.
Her initial results were even worse than she expected.
-You are not worried, are you? -Me, nope, nope, no, no.
COURIC: She found in kids' content, male characters dominated the storylines and
appeared twice as often as their female counterparts.
-Most often female characters are serving as eye candy.
They're hyper sexualized, or they just don't have enough to do.
-It pains me to see you reduced to this, Jasmine.
COURIC: You may be thinking.
-Oh my, God who the hell cares?
COURIC: But it matters. A lot.
And Davis says the impact can last a lifetime.
-The more hours of television a girl watches,
the fewer options she thinks she has in life.
And the more hours a boy watches, the more sexist his views become.
We're teaching kids from the beginning that girls are less valuable than boys
and they're taking it in unconsciously.
COURIC: But she says, two recent films actually hit the bullseye.
-I used to shoot archery.
And my archery coach called last year and said, suddenly in 2012 girls' participation
shot up 105% and what happened in 2012?
Brave and Hunger Games.
The impact was immediate.
-Thank you, for your consideration.
-It's like they went out after the movie and bought a bow.
COURIC: She decided to expand her research beyond children's fare and teamed up with
Google and the University of Southern California to develop the
Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient, or GD-IQ.
-It's analyzing exactly how much time the characters are on screen
and how much do they, how much do they speak.
-You did the math. -Yes sir. I looked beyond.
COURIC: It's hard to believe, but even in Hidden Figures,
a movie about 3 African American female mathematicians,
the women speak less than half the time.
And they're on screen just over half the time.
Hidden Figures actually scores better than most of the movies
that have been put through the GD-IQ.
Davis is convinced that once studios see this data,
the numbers for women will improve.
-Absolutely.
COURIC: I met up with Allison Schroeder, the screenwriter for Hidden Figures,
at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab.
Even with their limited screen time, she believes the three female leads opened up a world
of possibilities for little girls everywhere.
-My friend was saying that she was walking down the street with her
daughter in San Francisco.
She was holding her daughter's hand.
And she saw three African American women walking towards them.
And she said, "Mommy, mommy, look, astronauts."
What would she have thought six months ago?
That's change.
-We don't have to wait for society to turn things around
and then we'll reflect it on screen.
We can change how the world looks on screen in fiction,
and then life will imitate art.
-So clearly there's a problem.
But what are the root causes and how do we fix it?
I decided to come to Harvard University, where they're really smart,
to try to figure that out.
Hi! How are you?
MAHZARIN: Hello Katie Couric, what a pleasure!
-I am so happy to meet you!
COURIC: Mahzarin Banaji is one of the world's leading experts on a term that seems to be
everywhere lately; implicit bias, the deeply ingrained prejudices we
don't even realize we have.
-I'm nervous, I hope I don't screw this up.
-Don't be, you will not.
-Okay!
-Look, look, 18 million people have taken this test.
-Okay!
-You're gonna put your fingers on the "E" key and one on the "I" key,
and that's pretty much where they'll stay.
Hit the left key for male, right for female.
Go as fast as you can, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
-Okay, here we go.
You're shown a series of words like children, manager, salary, garden,
and asked to quickly decide whether you associate them with men or women.
So basically, I wondered, am I a closet sexist?
-You are pretty good.
COURIC: The results? Not what she was expecting.
-No bias at all!
-Yes! Really? -Yes.
COURIC: I've aced it!
It could mean I'm unbiased or I gamed the test.
Either way, I'm unusual.
-So 80% of women who take this test show an association of female and home,
male and career.
-And what about the men who take this test?
-75% of them also show it.
But interestingly, slightly less than women.
Which often surprises people.
COURIC: Banaji says we're not born with these biases, our brain forms them using the
information from the world around us.
-The human brain has something like 200 billion neurons.
It's just trying to use whatever rules it has learned
as it runs around in the world.
We wanna put things together and see what goes with what.
If I said to you, "bread," what's the first thing that comes to mind?
Butter. Why?
Because they go together.
-I was gonna say cheese!
-Cheese! Okay! Alright!
French Katie says cheese instead of butter because the vast majority of us have very
strong associations to any particular object that we've learned about.
COURIC: The brain starts making these associations when we're very young.
-What are the data? Mom stays at home.
Dad goes to work for many people.
Or mom goes to work and dad goes to work.
But when we come home, mom cooks.
COURIC: And adults reinforce these gender roles,
even if they don't realize they're doing it.
Check out this BBC experiment.
The little boy is dressed like a girl, and the little girl is dressed like a boy.
These volunteers don't know the true gender of these babies,
look at the toys they steer them towards.
-What's this one? What's that one do?
Is that a robot? Look at this.
Would you like a dolly? Should we go for the dolly?
There's a good girl.
You're a good little girl.
COURIC: Toys like robots, cars, and building blocks are critical in creating the
spatial reasoning skills that are required for careers in math and engineering.
Even the volunteers said they were shocked.
-That really astounded me because I thought that I was
somebody that had a really open mind.
-School lunch can be a difficult part of every kid's day.
COURIC: Advertisements also encourage our brains to make gender associations.
-I quit my job a while back to be with the kids.
COURIC: But things are changing.
Tide went from running commercials like this...
To this.
-And since I'm the one that has to do the laundry, I do what any expert dad would do.
I let her play sheriff.
I got 20 minutes to life.
-Show me what it looks like to run like a girl.
-Run Like a Girl is a great ad.
When you ask older girls, "What does it mean to say run like a girl?"
They run in this awkward way.
But you go to five, six, seven-year-old girls and say, "Run like a girl,"
and they run super-fast and strong.
And to them it doesn't make any sense to them why run like a girl
would mean anything other than run like a boy.
COURIC: It seems to be a trend.
-Sorry, no changing table in the men's.
-Advertisers put things out there because they sell, think it'll sell their product.
We as consumers can decide that we will say to them, "We will not buy your product."
And then that changes the advertisement.
I think this full cycle is, is worth thinking about because it does give us power to say,
"We can decide what kind of society we want."
-My dad's giving me a dad-do.
When you look in the mirror who do you see?
-Me.
-That strong is beautiful.
-We really are carrying the thumbprint of the culture on our brain
and as our culture changes, so will we.
COURIC: But even as popular culture is starting to change how we see women and girls,
one Hollywood powerhouse is determined to make sure no one is left out.
DAVIS: We're trying to get paid what white women get paid.
We're even trying to get the same kinda roles that they get.
COURIC: I've come to LA to talk with one of the biggest stars in Hollywood right now,
someone who has dealt with and seems to have conquered the challenges of being female and
black in an industry that hasn't always been receptive to either.
-And the Oscar goes to Viola Davis.
(applause).
DAVIS: To my husband and my daughter, you teach me every day how to live, how to love.
I'm so glad that you are the foundation of my life.
(applause).
COURIC: Viola Davis has emerged as one of the most
celebrated actors of her generation.
-You hurt my son to get your way.
COURIC: She earned her first Oscar nomination in 2008 for Doubt.
-My husband will kill that child over a thing like this.
COURIC: And won for Best Supporting Actress in Fences.
-Don't you think I ever wanted other things?
Don't you think I had dreams and hopes?
What about my life?
What about me?
COURIC: But it took TV to make her a household name, as complicated,
explosive defense attorney, Annalise Keating, on the hit show.
- How To Get Away With Murder.
-Viola Davis!
How to Get Away with Murder.
COURIC: Her performance earned her an Emmy in 2015 making her, shockingly,
the first black woman to win for Best Actress in a drama.
She didn't waste the moment.
-The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.
(applause)
You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there. Thank you.
COURIC: Along with her husband, actor Julius Tennon,
Davis is leading the revolt to make Hollywood more diverse, and not a moment too soon.
Of the top 100 films of 2016,
nearly half featured no African-American female characters.
What motivated you to decide you wanted a job in this crazy industry?
-Well, I didn't know it was crazy when I decided to be in the industry.
I saw it as a way out.
COURIC: A way out of Central Falls, Rhode Island, where she grew up so poor,
she went to bed every night with rags tied around her neck to keep
the rats from biting her.
She says it was this movie that gave her hope.
-I ain't gettin on no horse or nothing.
-Yea you comin' with me in the morning.
-When I first saw Miss Tyson as Jane Pittman when I was, like, six years old,
I thought to myself, if I could do that, if I could make that my life,
then I could be happy.
As a child growing up in poverty and dysfunction and violence.
If I could channel that into a character and become this great artist, I could be,
you know what?
I could matter.
I'm just going to say it.
I could matter.
-You were living proof that what you see really makes a difference.
-Absolutely. Because it's a physical manifestation of a dream.
If you don't see it, then there's no way for you to
construct it within your imagination.
-What were some of the walls that you faced when you started your acting career?
How much time do we have?
-Yes. I'm not pretty enough.
I'm too fat. I'm not good enough.
My hair. That was a big one.
My skin tone.
-You were being offered roles early in your career of a not fully realized person?
-Yeah, the Mamas.
Why you keep leaving' him like this Katrina?
I played a lot of crackhead mothers.
I mean, heroine addicted, crack addiction.
A lot of sassy people.
I'm suggesting you pick the poop up and throw it away now.
And it wasn't until I worked for a good decade that I said, "Wait a minute, I want more."
You is kind, you is smart, you is important.
COURIC: In 2011, Davis delivered a heartbreaking performance
as Aibileen Clark in The Help.
-You is important.
-That's right baby girl.
COURIC: She says while making the film was a great experience,
there was still something missing.
-About that book I want to write?
-I wanted the other side of Aibileen.
I wanted to see, you know, what was it like for her to be married?
Does she ever miss intimacy?
Is she really pissed off at, at Elizabeth?
What she calls Elizabeth when she's not around her.
You know, I wanted to see that.
-Instead of the perspective of Skeeter?
-I was cool with that.
What I wasn't cool with was our voices being somewhat stifled.
I think that if you had a microphone and put it in front of these women,
that what they would say is not something that would be nice.
-No one had ever asked me what it feel like to be me.
-I rewatched The Help recently, and I love the line at the end when Aibileen says,
"Nobody ever asks me what it's like to be me."
-Absolutely. -In a way, that is emblematic of how you felt.
-Absolutely.
That basically is a metaphor for me as an actress of what's missing in the industry,
the three-dimensional human being.
COURIC: And that's not the only thing missing.
Of the top 10 highest earning actresses last year, none of them is black.
-My big thing as a black woman, and I think I can speak for most black women in
Hollywood, we're trying to get paid what white women get paid.
We're even trying to get the same kinda roles that they get.
JULIUS: She should be getting roles that reflect the talent that she is.
That's how JuVee was born.
COURIC: JuVee is the production company Viola and Julius founded 7 years ago to
broaden the possibilities for actors, writers and producers of color.
-The most important question you can ask is why.
Why does a woman have to be a size zero in order to have a love interest on screen?
Why does she have to be lighter than a paper bag?
Why can't she be dark-skinned?
Why can't I wear my natural hair sometimes?
We're waking them up to understand that art is indeed a reflection of life and we're
in that reflection.
-Hi. -Hi, how are you?
COURIC: Julius invited me to stop by the JuVee offices to sit in on their weekly
development meeting.
-I also just feel like the black teen male experience hasn't really been explored
much on television.
COURIC: Sometimes disrupting the system means being open to who can play what character.
-Letting it be authentic to the role and the story you're telling as opposed to saying,
this is a white person.
This is a black person. This is an Asian person.
It limits the opportunity for everyone except for who the writer
has already told you should be in that role.
But if you just describe the character, the character's a doctor.
He's tall. He's handsome.
-Or the doctor's attractive instead of tall and handsome.
-Exactly, yeah. -'Cause you just made him into a man.
-Mhm. -No, good point, right?
-And I think having these kinds of conversations with writers when we bring them in
and talk about characters could be, you know, getting them to think out of the box.
COURIC: Frances McDormand had another suggestion on Oscar night:
-I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: inclusion rider.
COURIC: It's a clause that allows stars and directors
to demand diversity on their productions.
-I'm ready to party!
COURIC: The man who brought us Bridesmaids and Ghostbusters with an all-female cast was
one of the first to make this pledge two years ago:
-It's a way to put into a contract that, that, you know,
the people in charge of this project have to make a,
a concerted effort to get 50-50 parity behind the, behind the camera.
COURIC: But the biggest change-maker of all may be box office success.
-Let's go!
COURIC: Black Panther, which has made over a billion dollars and counting,
proved there's a huge appetite for strong black female characters.
-Don't freeze. -I never freeze.
COURIC: Including one of JuVee's upcoming projects, which will star
Lupita Nyong'o and Viola Davis.
-I always even tell my daughter, I don't care if you're 12.5% of the pie.
I still want the whole pie.
I know I'm not gonna get it, but I want all of it.
I want what Meryl Streep has.
I want what Sandra Bullock has.
And I want that for all these young, really great actors of color.
When you really wanna make big changes, really big, big changes, in a big, big,
big industry, then just dare to swing the pendulum just a little bit.
That's all it needs.
I feel like that's revolutionary.
COURIC: But Hollywood isn't the only industry in need of a revolution.
Next, I head north to Silicon Valley to meet the women calling for change there,
and the former Google engineer who claims men are getting a raw deal.
-You think you faced a certain kind of discrimination?
♪ ♪
COURIC: The other place generating big headlines about sexual harassment,
discrimination and pay inequality is right here in San Francisco and south of
here in Silicon Valley.
Now these are the people who will really be determining what's
on our screens in the future.
Months before the Weinstein story broke, the tech world was shaken
by its own deluge of sexual harassment allegations.
And just like in Hollywood, what started as a conversation about sexual harassment has
turned into a much bigger awakening about gender inequality in an industry
shaping our future.
What better place to gather some war stories from women in the trenches of tech.
Hi ladies! How are you?
Than the golf course?
Well in this case, the miniature golf course.
AUBREY: I'm usually only good at things that involve books.
COURIC: Aubrey Blanche is head of Diversity and Inclusion at a software company.
Erica Baker is a former engineer at Google.
Kieran Snyder is the CEO of her own start up.
And Lisa Lee is head of Diversity and Inclusion at Pandora.
Ladies, I believe you, you ordered these!
-Yay, wow.
-What have your experiences been like as a woman in tech?
ERICA: I've been writing code since I was ten years old.
Like, it's been part of who I am for a long time.
And I got to the tech industry and I immediately got pushback.
Like, are you sure you're supposed to be here?
Like is this for you?
-Why do you think they were so skeptical?
-Oh, because I'm a black woman. Right?
Like, the picture that we painted of what an engineer looks like in
the media and society is a white man.
-In a hoodie.
-In a hoodie now, it used to be in a pocket protector.
I've been asked if I was part of the cleaning crew.
I've had an executive at my former company ask if I was my teammate's assistant and it's
extremely frustrating.
-Or asked to grab the water. Asked to take the notes.
-Have you ever punched anyone in the nose?
(laughter).
Their stories are not unusual.
Just ask Kara Swisher.
How did we get here?
-Here where?
-How did we find ourselves in this predicament where women in tech
are really being challenged?
-Well, they never were not in this predicament.
I just think it's being talked about.
This was always the case.
This has been a male dominated industry since its inception.
COURIC: Swisher has been described as the most feared
and well-liked journalist covering tech.
Even playing herself on HBO's Silicon Valley.
-It's dangerous out there for billionaires?
-There's that attitude again, Kara.
-Most of these companies are run by, by men, usually white men, usually young, white men.
-How bad is it? -It's bad.
You know, you look on boards.
Ten white men.
How did that happen?
Is that mathematically possible?
Are they all just so fantastic that they meet, you know, these,
these great standards and they're so much better.
COURIC: Right now, 91% of board seats at so called "unicorn" tech companies,
those valued at more than a billion dollars, are held by men.
68% of these companies, including Airbnb and WeWork,
have no women board members at all.
Let's talk about hiring.
It's supposed to be a meritocracy.
-Right. -But you don't think it is.
-No, I don't. I think it's, I call it a mirrortocracy.
They're looking at people like themselves and they pick people like themselves.
COURIC: And that's reflected in who gets
the top management spots,
at companies like Apple, Google and Twitter,
less than 20% of leadership positions
are held by women.
Facebook fares a bit better with 28%.
-To me, when you select like that you leave out diversity of thought and
ideas that you didn't know you had.
And even if you're successful, could you have been more successful?
COURIC: When it comes to technical roles like engineering
at these same companies, also overwhelmingly male.
-90% of AI designers are white men of a certain age.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute.
AI's gonna change everything.
If only a certain amount of people are creating the future,
you're gonna get the future they want, not the future that you want.
And they're gonna have the power.
What hasn't been invented because some fantastic young woman was not given the
support she needed, that she deserved?
I don't know what that is. And, I know she's there.
I know she's somewhere.
-What impact do you think all this attention on harassment will have on the culture?
-Well, I think it brings things to light.
One of the good parts about it everyone is tired of being quiet.
Every woman has a story of sexism or misogyny and many men don't know that.
And so now they're gonna tell them and now they're gonna hear and now they can't say
they didn't know.
-This awakening in Silicon Valley by women in tech has created a major backlash by
some men who are feeling angry, resentful, frustrated and misunderstood.
And nobody, I think, epitomizes those feelings more than the young man I'm about
to meet, a former Google engineer by the name of James Damore who wrote a manifesto
that made a lot of folks really, really mad.
COURIC: The manifesto came in the form of a 10-page memo Damore wrote last July.
Among his incendiary claims...
Women can't handle high stress careers because they're more neurotic.
Men are innately better and more interested in jobs like software engineer.
And the gender wage gap is a myth.
REPORTER (over TV): 28-year-old engineer James Damore.
REPORTER (over TV): Memo that's rocking the tech world,
Google firing an engineer behind a document.
REPORTER (over TV): Google CEO reportedly rushing back
from vacation to handle the fallout.
COURIC: I joined him and some of his supporters for a backyard barbeque.
Hi everyone, I'm Katie.
-James. -Hi James, nice to meet you.
Over grilled sausages and kabobs, Damore told me he's just a nerd who was trying to
make Google better.
Last year Google increased the number of women in technical roles,
but 80% of those jobs are still occupied by men.
-They assume that all of that gap is due to discrimination against women when some of it
may be due to simply them not being interested as much as men on average are.
-People went crazy over your manifesto, to say the least.
And they found it incredibly offensive, suggesting that women didn't have the capacity
to excel in science, engineering.
-Right, so I never talked about capabilities or aptitude.
It was really about preference.
COURIC: Damore claims job preferences are partly shaped by biology,
specifically prenatal testosterone.
Do you think that women who veer toward a different profession and men who do
might do so because of cultural conditioning rather
than some kind of innate hardwiring?
-So there's definitely expectations placed on people, but there's also a lot of
evidence that some of this is innate.
COURIC: And he told me he believes Google gives women preferential treatment.
-They give extra opportunities to women.
They assume that there is this bias against women and so they try to correct for it.
But in some cases, they may overcorrect.
COURIC: Damore was fired and is suing Google, claiming it's a liberal culture that
discriminates against white, conservative men.
You think you think you faced a certain kind of discrimination?
-Definitely.
COURIC: A Google spokesperson told us.
After my conversation with James Damore, I headed to Barnard College to speak
with Rebecca Jordan-Young, a scientist who
analyzes research on gender and biology.
What did you think when you first read James Damore's manifesto?
-I thought it was very defensive.
I thought it was a backlash document.
It just simply doesn't hold up scientifically.
In fact they're scientifically pretty lazy and old-school arguments.
He was ignoring a vast amount of scientific data that point directly away from this
conclusion that prenatal testosterone makes any significant difference in what
you're interested in or what your career aspirations might actually be,
whether somebody has the skills or interests to do well in math,
science or tech or be innovative or any of that.
My concern is that the easier answer that something is innate is just
an argument for the status quo.
COURIC: Some have argued the status quo exists because the number of women getting
degrees in computer science has been steadily declining since the mid-1980s.
But the women I spoke with said not having that degree doesn't seem
to be holding men back.
-I can't tell you how many times I meet men engineers who
are not formally educated in computer science.
Oh, you don't have a degree?
Oh you can code?
Yes, please come in.
And we have a lot of women like that too,
and they're not given the benefit of the doubt.
We're making it a different standard for male engineers.
COURIC: According to several studies, the women who do end up in tech are twice as likely
to leave, not because of so-called work-life issues, but because of a culture that
ranges from inhospitable to downright hostile.
It sounds to me that it's death by a thousand cuts.
-You talk to women two years and four years and ten years in,
the fatigue really starts to escalate.
They may still love technology, but they also carry so much other junk along
with them from the way they've been treated over the years.
COURIC: Aubrey Blanche says there are solutions:
-75% of our new executive and board members hired over the last two years were women.
And 50% of them were people of color.
And that was because we employed the Rooney rule.
COURIC: Named for the former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers,
this NFL rule requires at least one minority candidate be interviewed when there's an
opening for a coaching or management job.
-So they're not required to be hired, but we are required to reach out to them.
And it may sound silly, but it's really hard to hire someone you never interview.
-What is the best solution to fix the pay equity gap?
-I would love to see more companies being transparent about their salary bands.
-No negotiation, inclusive of all gender, race and,
you're just offered what you're offered and you'll take it or not.
SWISHER: Blind resumes.
They give you a technical problem.
You solve it.
You're not judged on your clothes or how you look.
And when you're judged just by the work, you tend to have a more diverse workforce.
COURIC: In 1952, the Boston Symphony began holding blind auditions,
in an effort to make its orchestra more diverse.
As a result, the odds of a woman getting through
the preliminary round increased by 50%.
-Good luck.
COURIC: We got a chance to peek behind the curtain as
the symphony recreated a blind audition.
♪ ♪
-I feel that freedom, absolutely, because it is blind.
I really don't feel like I'm being judged except listened to.
COURIC: And now, out of the 1200 orchestras in the country,
more than a thousand conduct blind auditions.
-It's taken us 65 years to get to the point where a third of the members of the Boston
Symphony are women.
COURIC: The women in Hollywood and Silicon Valley hope that it won't take another 65 years
to usher in real change.
And neither do these women who are standing with them on the front lines of the revolt.
-Yes we can, yes we can!
COURIC: I'm back home in New York City.
-Yes we can, yes we can!
COURIC: And just in time for the Second Annual Women's March.
Tell me about the women you're representing here today.
-The women I'm representing and I'm marching with are women who work in our homes,
as nannies caring for our children, as house cleaners, maintaining sanity
as homecare workers caring for our aging parents.
And it's incredibly undervalued work.
COURIC: Ai-jen Poo is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
-The annual median income for a homecare worker is $13,000 per year.
And there's incredible abuse because of the vulnerability and the isolation.
COURIC: When several celebrated actors brought activists as their guests to
this year's Golden Globes, her date was Meryl Streep.
-What do you hope people take away from this evening?
-I hope people see the momentum and the energy and the fact that we're uniting
across all industries.
It was another level of awakening of it's not just me, I'm not alone,
and it's not just us.
DAVIS: Hollywood is just a metaphor to what's happening everywhere.
Because listen, you can have a teacher, or a priest, or a rabbi,
who has that power over someone who's really young and vulnerable, too.
They just have a different position.
They, they're not a Weinstein.
You know, they're not a Kevin Spacey.
JULIUS: They're not in the limelight.
-And they're not promising celebrity to your point.
-They're not promising celebrity.
But what they are is they're wielding a, invisible power.
Over someone who is vulnerable.
-Everywhere we go, people want to know!
COURIC: Someone like Daniela Contreras.
-Buenos dias!
COURIC: Whose story, like so many others, took place out of the limelight.
-I was on my first job as a nanny so, pretty nervous the first time, but it was fine.
COURIC: Until she started to feel unsafe around the child's father.
-Suddenly he was coming home early.
He was takin' a shower.
He will forget the towel.
Daniela will have to bring it.
So one day he comes home, takes his shower, calls me for the towel
and then he tries to rape me.
Thankfully someone knocked on the door.
The first thing I did was run out of that house, as fast as I could.
Went home. Never went back.
But I never talk about it.
-This workforce has been excluded from some of the most basic protections
that most of us take for granted.
There's incredible vulnerability to abuse and exploitation.
COURIC: When the #MeToo movement caught fire on social media, Contreras,
now the mother of a 5-year-old daughter, decided to speak out.
-I don't really like to share personal things on social media too much,
but I feel like by me sharing a story I was letting other people to say, "Yes,
it's okay to say #MeToo.
This is the time to talk about it."
COURIC: Contreras has been so empowered by sharing her story,
she is now an organizer for the alliance.
-One thing I always said when I was little, I said I wanted to change the world.
And when I was given the chance to be part of the National Domestic Workers' Alliance,
I said, "Here, this is it."
This is how you can help other people."
-We are domestic workers!
-Domestic workers have been organizing for more than
20 years in pockets around the country.
And what we're seeing now is a real surge in women's activism across industries.
Having it more public through the entertainment industry is really helping to bring
visibility to all the women who've been doing so behind closed doors.
What it also tells us is that we have common cause.
And what we're starting to see is us realizing the power of coming together
with that common cause.
COURIC: There have been moments in my lifetime when it's felt like this before.
1992 has emerged as the Year of the Woman.
But this time, it really does feel different.
As if the dam has finally broken.
And a movement is spilling over into households and factory floors,
Hollywood sets and Silicon Valley startups.
The revolt has come.
And listening to these women, it's not going anywhere.
-This is where women standing in solidarity with other women really comes into play.
-Silicon Valley can lead the way.
We should be better.
DAVIS: I've never said yes during any of the other times
that were supposed to be watershed moments.
But it definitely is now.
MAHZARIN: If we are at all students of history, when we look at the changes across
history, how can we be anything but optimistic?
-I think it really is a turning point.
I don't think you can go back from here.
And I know that there's a lot of women who won't let it.
Hmph.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.