One episode into Good Girls Revolt and I was hooked. In describing the show, I told people it was essentially made for young women like me. I even sent a text to my hometown group chat saying, “GUYS GOOD GIRLS REVOLT IS EVERYTHING.”
Based on true events, the series follows a group of women who work as researchers at a news magazine called News of the Week, which is actually modelled after Newsweek. The time period is 1969 and women in the newsroom were limited to low-level positions, hence researchers instead of reporters. They weren’t allowed by-lines in the magazine, even though often they were doing the same work as their male counterparts. And they were getting paid far less. The women end up filing a complaint against the magazine. Ironically, at the time of watching the show I was writing an article on the gender pay gap, so you might understand why I was so passionate about it.
Mid binge-watching, I found out that the series on Amazon Video got cancelled. Mind you, the show had only been released on October 29th and they were in the process of pitching season 2. The show’s cancellation has actually drawn a lot of attention. It seems that the head of Amazon Video, Roy Price, didn’t have a very strong reason for cancelling it. There were statements that it wasn’t performing as well as they had expected, but data shows that they had the second biggest debut series for an Amazon orignal. For a show that is extremely relevant after, dare I say it, a man like Donald Trump winning the presidential election, the cancellation comes as a huge disappointment. Luckily, Sony has faith in Good Girls Revolt and its viewers and will pitch it to other streaming networks like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO. In the meantime, a petition with over 20,000 signatures is circulating and fans are being asked to use #SaveGoodGirlsRevolt to generate positive attention.
In the two weeks I binge-watched Good Girls Revolt, here’s what I learned:
1) We’ve made progress, but only to a certain extent.
Granted women aren’t filing complaints like the one in Good Girls Revolt, but they are still fighting for equal pay. As of April 12, 2016 the average female’s salary was 79% of the average male’s salary. Women still only make up one-third of journalists. And they only make up 20% of the executive positions in large media companies. Only 3% of film directors and 12% of directors of streaming shows are women. And for every one woman screenwriter, there are 2.5 male screenwriters. Statistics like this go on and on. Yes, we’ve made progress, but there’s still a lot to fight for.
2) Women need to support other women.
It took the initiative of two women to file the complaint against News of the Week. But knowing that there was strength in numbers, they convinced a total of 46 women who worked at the magazine that filing the complaint was worth it. Even though they faced a lot of resistance in the beginning, it wouldn’t have happened or even been as powerful if they didn’t support each other.
3) You can’t wait for change to happen; you have to make it happen yourself.
It’s so easy for us to get frustrated by the inequalities we face, but if we don’t play an active part in trying to change things, they probably won’t. It can be something small, like writing an article (hello, that’s where I come in), or starting a club on campus or organizing events to support your cause, anything that gets the conversation started. It’s easy for us to feel like we don’t play much of a part in change, but every big social movement had to start somewhere.
4) It’s a man’s world and I don’t want to just be living in it.
It’s quite ironic that a show about women fighting for equal representation got cancelled as quickly as it did. And even more ironic that it was cancelled by a male executive. It’s like they’re silencing everything the show stands for. An article written in The Atlantic says that women are physically not in the room “when plans are formulated, marketing campaigns created, technologies designed, and decisions made.” Which matters, especially when you’re marketing products to women. How do they expect to pitch to a female audience when they don’t have the female perspective?
Marianne Cooper of The Atlantic said it best, “It has been many decades since Lynn Povich and her female colleagues sued Newsweek, and yet there is so little distance between the world in the show and the world that controlled the show’s fate.”