I realized that in all the sectors of society where there's a huge gender disparity, the one place that can be fixed overnight is onscreen. You think about getting half of Congress, or the presidency ... It's going to take a while no matter how hard we work on it. But half of the board members and half of the CEOs can be women in the next movie somebody makes; it can be absolutely half.
Geena DavisA woman as the leader of the Free World is an impossibility. Muslim countries won't talk to you.
Geena DavisI wanted to take up a sport the real way and see if I actually had athletic ability. And then I happened to see it was during the Atlanta Olympics. And there was a lot of coverage of archery because the U.S. men's team won all the medals. And I thought, "Wow, that's beautiful. And it's so dramatic, a beautiful sport. And I wonder if I would be good at it?"
Geena DavisBehind the cameras, there's a different problem, which I think is not unconscious gender bias. It's probably categorized more as conscious gender bias. Because everybody's known the numbers for decades. Nobody's stunned to hear there are very few female directors, only 4 or 7 percent. Everybody knows, but it doesn't change anything. It doesn't make people say, "Wow! We should change that." Nothing happens. It's utterly stagnant.
Geena DavisI had a deliberate plan to get into movies by becoming a model, so I went to New York and got a job pretending to be a mannequin in store windows.
Geena DavisMy whole theory about why I couldnโt find any creators who realized they were leaving out female characters is because they were raised on the same ratio. I just heard someone the other day call it either โsmurfingโ a movie, which is when thereโs one female character, or โminioningโ a movie, which is when thereโs no female characters.
Geena Davis