[Kaiserschmarrn]

European Human Rights Council Condemns Gender Bias in Film Industry


Inside the Council of Europe’s meeting chambers.

The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers issued its first pan-European recommendation last week. It aims to create practical solutions to eliminate gender bias from the film industry. While the council cannot mandate that any EU-affiliated states participate in the suggestions of the recommendation, nor can they enforce it, the council said they hope it puts political pressure on governments and corporations, according to a press release.

The recommendation outlines barriers to gender equality in the film sector—such as unequal investment and employment opportunities, low female representation on executive boards and unequal pay—and urges states involved in the EU to support the implementation of the recommendation.

The Hollywood Reporter picked up the news, dubbing the report a “body slam” to the industry.

The report advises european governments to collect updated statistics that monitor gender inequality, review and expand legislation to encourage inclusivity and promote research on inequality in the film industry.

Technology, journalism and art are just a few of the industries that rival Hollywood in gender inequality. A 2014 study led by Dr. Stacy Smith, Ph.D., and her team at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, found that women made up 30.2 percent of all speaking roles or named characters in the 700 biggest box office films from 2007 to 2014. Only 28 of those films were directed by women.

The answer to this problem, according to the Committee of Ministers, is to promote media literacy and enable young people to “acquire a critical view of representations of women and men and to decode sexist stereotypes.” Geena Davis, who founded an eponymous institute to promote gender equality in the media in 2006, told Observer in a 2015 interview that “this absence of women is drumming this message into kids’ heads that girls aren’t as important as boys.”

“I also think that there’s a sort of axiom that Hollywood lives by that says women will watch men, but men won’t watch women,” she said. “So we never gain any momentum, despite the evidence that female-led movies can be incredibly successful.”

I take this as proof that we don't have any real human rights issues anymore. Our bureaucrats now have to invent non-issues to justify their existence and pay.

Time to disband and also to stop publicly funding "research" into this and similar matters.

[foxdemon]

The report advises european governments to collect updated statistics that monitor gender inequality, review and expand legislation to encourage inclusivity and promote research on inequality in the film industry.

Sounds like a make work initutive for social scientists.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

It's clearly more important for EU bureaucrats to pour money and "research" into non-issues like a lack of a perfect 50/50 gender representation in the important field of film industry executive boards than to focus on poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, wages, the EU's support for terrorism and slaughter of civilians, the EU's failure with Britain and handling of Greece and Portugal, the EU's lack of meaningful response to Catalonia, and other meaningful issues.

*Does a magician thing with his hand distracting people over here while using his other hand to jerk off on a picture of the human race, forever, over there, contemptuously*

[Heisenberg]

I'm still waiting for an official EU condemnation of Spain's return to Franco-era oppression, which strikes me as more important than moralising about the film industry.

[Ter]

The drunkard Juncker and his overpaid, untaxed, arrogant bunch of unelected bureaucrats have just appealed for dialogue between Spain and Catalonia.
So you see, they are worth the millions of Euro those swine cost.
Juncker is even going to telephone Spain's prime Minister later today !
They are clearly on top of this.

[The Sabbaticus]

The Council of Europe is an organization that predates the EU and Russia is also a member state. It was meant as a platform for dialogue and to broach the divide between Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Recently, however it has become the mouthpiece for progressive ideologues and has amongst other things advocated journalists to stop reporting on the Islamic background of Muslim terrorists in order to stop 'Islamophobia'. And it also routinely investigates member states over 'racial issues' and has condemned The Netherlands amongst others over complaints by otherwise irrelevant parties.

[Beren]

The Council of Europe (CoE; French: Conseil de l'Europe) is an international organisation whose stated aim is to uphold human rights, democracy, rule of law in Europeand promote European culture. Founded in 1949, it has 47 member states, covers approximately 820 million people and operates with an annual budget of approximately half a billion euros.

The organisation is distinct from the 28-nation European Union (EU), although it is sometimes confused with it, partly because the EU has adopted the original European Flag which was created by the Council of Europe in 1955, as well as the European Anthem. No country has ever joined the EU without first belonging to the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe is an official United Nations Observer.

Unlike the EU, the Council of Europe cannot make binding laws, but it does have the power to enforce select international agreements reached by European states on various topics. The best known body of the Council of Europe is the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Council's two statutory bodies are the Committee of Ministers, comprising the foreign ministers of each member state, and the Parliamentary Assembly, composed of members of the national parliaments of each member state. The Commissioner for Human Rights is an independent institution within the Council of Europe, mandated to promote awareness of and respect for human rights in the member states. The Secretary General heads the secretariat of the organisation. Other major CoE bodies include the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines.

The picture in the OP depicts the European Parliament's hemicycle, which is not "the Council of Europe's meeting chamber."

Council's Parliamentary Assembly hemicycle, plenary chamber of the Council of Europe's Palace of Europe in Strasbourg