Media can do a lot to change what people think.  If you are a media professional and you are thinking of ways to support women’s equality, I’d like to offer you food for thought.  Your words, photos, graphics and memes can contribute positive or negatively.  As a media professional, you can decide how you’d like to depict women.

Writers can think about the ways they present women in fiction and screenplays.  How can we create more representative characters with more self-direction than the clichéd “damsel in distress?”  Imagine that your own daughter is sitting down to read or watch.  How would you want her life to play out, if she by some chance found herself in the same situation?  You see the choices we make about depicting women will have a psycho-social emotional effect on girls and women.  It will either create more empowered viewers who see their lives as manageable and intriguing or those who feel helpless and obliged to accept whatever the world throws at her feet.

Studies already show that children who watch violence on Television are likely to engage in forms of more violent play, so we know that images and perceptions matter.  How can we create characters, stories and ideas that assign women more verbs than adjectives?