The fight to end workplace sexual harassment is still going strong in the new year. Reese Witherspoon and Shonda Rhimes are just a couple of the 300 Hollywood women who are banding together for Time’s Up, a new initiative focused on combating harassment in show business and working class professions. Time’s Up was officially launched on January 1 via an open letter published in The New York Times and La Opinion.
“The struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly,” the letter stated, per the NYT.
A legal defense fund designed to help working class women “protect themselves from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it” is among the items on Time’s Up action plan. The initiative is also working on anti-harassment legislation, advocating for gender parity at studios and talent agencies, and encouraging women to wear black at the Golden Globes in order to raise awareness about the pervasiveness of harassment.
Time’s Up is a coalition of several different groups, including those behind the Anita Hill-led Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace and ICM’s promise to reach full 50–50 gender parity by 2020.
“It’s very hard for us to speak righteously about the rest of anything if we haven’t cleaned our own house,” Rhimes told NYT. “If this group of women can’t fight for a model for other women who don’t have as much power and privilege, then who can?”
The initiative — which also boasts Emma Stone, Natalie Portman, Ashley Judd, Eva Longoria, America Ferrera, Rashida Jones, and Kerry Washington among its ranks — is determined to be as intersectional and inclusive as possible with women of color and LGBTQ-identifying women. And Time’s Up isn’t just for the women of Hollywood: it’s also going to bat for women outside of the entertainment industry.
“We have been siloed off from each other,” Witherspoon explained. “We’re finally hearing each other, and seeing each other, and now locking arms in solidarity with each other, and in solidarity for every woman who doesn’t feel seen, to be finally heard.” What a great way to welcome 2018.
