I thought I knew what I needed to know about media literacy and gender stereotypes and their relationship to self esteem, leadership and power. I thought I was equipped to raise healthy children who could parse dangerous marketing messages. And then my daughter, only six years old, stopped wearing certain items of clothing lest they make her look fat. And I heard about first graders on diets. And I got scared. Children today consume on average more than 10 hours of media a day including Youtube, Reality TV, “chick flicks”, gossip magazines, talk shows, sitcoms, and Superbowl commercials. Its no wonder managing the message is so hard. And its no wonder Miss Representation, a powerful documentary that examines the media’s impact on women and society, is generating so much discussion Miss Representation goes beyond the groundbreaking work in the Killing Us Softly films and discusses how media affects women as leaders. Consider this: Women makeup only 17 percent of Congress despite representing 51 percent of the population. Eighty-four percent of guests on Sunday morning political tv talk shows and 85 percent of radio producers are men. Eighty percent of the op-ed pages are dominated by men. The number of women in senior management positions globally has gone from 24 percent [...]
