A number of activists leading the fight for gender equality in Hollywood are slated to attend the second annual Women’s Media Summit. Set to take place April 5–7 in Provincetown, MA, the event will see inclusion rider co-creator Dr. Stacy Smith delivering the keynote. She’ll be joined at the Summit by the rider’s co-creators, producer Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni and attorney Kalpana Kotaga, Deadline confirms.
Smith first introduced the idea of adding inclusion riders to Hollywood contracts in 2014, but the concept didn’t become a part of public discourse until Frances McDormand mentioned it in her Oscar acceptance speech earlier this month. “I have two words for you: inclusion rider,” the “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” star said at the podium, inspiring countless Google searches around the world.
DiGiovanni is “head strategic outreach at Matt Damon’s and Ben Affleck’s Pearl Street Films,” and “picked up the idea [of the inclusion rider] and took it to Kotagal, a partner at the law firm Cohen Milstein, who drew up the legal document,” the source details.
The founder and director of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, Smith has been advocating for a more inclusive industry for well over a decade.
“Hollywood has kept women filmmakers shut out for decades because it is allowed to self-regulate and faces no effective oversight body,” said director Maria Giese, co-founder of the Women’s Media Summit. “Now is the time to stop relying on inside industry solutions and demand the opportunity for equal participation in our nation’s cultural narrative.”
Last year’s Summit saw the assembly breaking out into groups including a facilitator and a scribe. “Each group was assigned to come up with five or so proposals to create immediately actionable solutions to gender inequity in Hollywood and the proposals could include anything,” Giese explained in a guest post for Women and Hollywood. “Forty-five different proposals were pared down to seven resolutions that the Women’s Media Summit” pursued and put into action, and were published in a white paper.
According to Deadline, “this April’s summit will be centered on implementing the White Paper’s seven plans of action: Litigation against gender discrimination; Lobbying policymakers to address gender discrimination in entertainment; Offering tax credits to encourage hiring women in key storytelling positions; Developing a financing network for female filmmakers; Gathering money for female filmmakers through the Women’s Media Incubator and Marketplace and FundHer; Creating a marketing campaign to educate the public about gender discrimination in Hollywood; Creating a consumer activism campaign to encourage viewers to vote with their dollars for gender equality.”
“The EEOC is reportedly in talks with all six major studios, but a settlement is taking too long,” Giese told the source. “Hollywood is loathe to have the federal government interfere in the industry. But history has shown that all the major advancements for female hires have come as the result of legal action. The fact is, how America’s cultural narrative formed through our entertainment media should be a central concern of all Americans. We should not leave it in the hands of a small group of Hollywood insiders to determine. We, the people, need to hold the reins of this change. We need to make sure our federal government is upholding employment rights in our entertainment industry so we all get to be a part of the story.”
Giese played a major role in kicking off the EEOC’s current investigation into discriminatory hiring practices for women directors in Hollywood. She brought the issue to the ACLU.
Other speakers and panelists at this year’s Summit include April Reign, senior director of marketing for Fractured Atlas and creator of the viral hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, Gillian Thomas, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, and Cristina Escobar, director of communications at The Representation Project.
Head over to the Summit’s website for more information, including how to register and the event’s schedule and use 5050BY2020 to receive a discount on admission.
