“Run away from a man who can’t handle your ambition. Run.”
Reese Witherspoon has always been one of my favorite actresses, and not just because she’s known for blowing up banks and teaching us all the “Bend and Snap”. Her successful acting career began at just 14 years old, and she’s starred in and even produced over 41 movies.
Her movie star life isn’t her only success though, she’s also a kickass business woman. She recently created her own production company called Pacific Standard, which produced the films Gone Girl and Wild. In an essay written for Glamour magazine that’s out next month (stop right now and go read this if you haven’t!!), she says “I started a production company five years ago to create more roles for women onscreen and behind the scenes. Today I have something like 23 projects in the works driven by great female characters of different ages and races.” She even self-funded the company for years before it made enough money on its own. In addition to this, she started her own clothing line called Draper James that is the epitome of Southern sass and charm. She is currently working on creating a multimedia company called Hello Sunshine which is a social platform for women all over the country to share their stories of their own personal joys and struggles in life. My favorite part of her essay for the magazine is how she kept citing stats and research studies to back up what she was saying. She is clearly very well-educated on the topics of a woman’s struggle in Hollywood, and the fact that ambitious women scare the hell out of men.
She first addressed the ambition issue two years ago in her acceptance speech for Woman of the Year, saying how women having ambitions should not be perceived as a negative trait, and how there are research studies that show women getting treated differently because they are seeking power. Faced with the choice of either staying quiet and keeping her head down, or standing up for what she believed in, she took her mother’s advice; “If you want something done, honey, do it yourself” and proved that women can do any man’s job, and sometimes do it better.
More importantly, she touched on issues such as unequal representation and pay for women as well. A study conducted by Columbia University showed that a woman who has ambitious traits is perceived as selfish and less hirable than a man with the same traits. Another study by Harvard University concluded that female M.B.A. students were downplaying their career goals and ambitions in front of male students in fear that they would potentially hurt their marriage prospects. Since when is ambition and determination a bad thing?
The results of these studies just further prove that despite it being 2017, women have not come as far as we would have liked. She notes how in Hollywood, when a male producer has a few movies that don’t do well, it is still easier for him to get another job than it is for a woman who had one bad movie. This is what she is striving to change by having her own production company. She has created an opportunity for women to act, direct, and produce, and not have to answer to a man in the process. Only about 1 in 4 people working in the roles of writing, directing, and producing in TV are women, and only 17% in films, and she says that is the biggest thing she wants to change. So far, all of her hard work has paid off; in the last year, she has had three major successes with Gone Girl, Wild, and Big Little Lies. “I can tell that I’m considered a player [as a producer] now because of the respect I get from studio heads. They call me back quicker.”
She really gives her best advice when she says “If you are one of those people who has that little voice in the back of her mind saying, “Maybe I could do [fill in the blank],” don’t tell it to be quiet. Give it a little room to grow, and try to find an environment it can grow in.” So that’s your new goal for the day; go out and channel your inner Reese, freak out all the boys with your crazy ambitions, and find places where your ideas and aspirations can grow.
“What would happen if we encouraged women to be a little more ambitious? I think the world would change.”
Sources:
https://www.biography.com/people/reese-witherspoon-9542503
https://www.glamour.com/story/reese-witherspoon-october-2017-cover-inter…