About Episode
In this episode I speak with Kylee Wall and Siân Fever about work environments for women in post-production. This episode was inspired by a recent article by Kylee Wall on Creative Cow titled Sexism In Post. We talk about why Kylee wrote the article in the first place, lots of different studies about the gender gap in post-production, wage differences for the same jobs, and we even go as far to discuss sexual harassment and other not-so-pleasant topics. This is part 1 of a 2 part podcast.
Useful Links
- Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media research
- Learning to Love Criticism
- Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film
- Gender Gap in STEM
- The Bechdel Test
- A 2011 McKinsey
- Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead
- Howard / Heidi experiment
- Confidence Woman in Time Magazine
- Thelma Schoonmaker in MovieMaker Magazine
Transcript
Kylee Wall: Hello.
Zack Arnold: There we go.
Sian Fever: Hello.
Zack Arnold: You are a tad hot, Kylie.
Kylee Wall: Okay.
Zack Arnold: Nan, I just realized on a show about sexism in post, I should probably say your microphone is a little loud. So good. I don’t want to get myself in trouble before we even start here. Oh,
Sian Fever: Hey. Well, at least you’re not a gaffer, and you know you’ve got redheads, blonds. I mean.
Zack Arnold: Right. True. True. True. Well, considering the topic, you both might end up screaming into the microphone, so you may want to keep an eye on on your microphone levels because who knows where this is going to go. Oh,
Sian Fever: Zack, you know, I was having dinner with a friend last night, and generally we we were kind of chewing over the topic, and I was saying I get text messages from producers of the kind of sexy variety, unsolicited, completely like unprompted. And as we were sat there, one came through from someone I worked with like two months ago. Have had no contact with. Who’s kind of trying to, I don’t know. Forge some some kind of flirting. I think.
Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, yoy.
Kylee Wall: That’s so gross.
Sian Fever: It happens on an alarmingly regular basis. That after a job finishes, and I because I do short form, so my job turnover is pretty high, and I’ll do maybe one or two different jobs with different clients a week, and that’s that’s kind of a byproduct of that. Yeah, you get these kind of inappropriate text messages, and as I sat there, one came through, and it’s like, okay, right. Not going to work for that company again, am I? Because you know, just that person might be embarrassed, or that person, you know, might not have thought that through, or you know, I’ve had I’ve had about two hours sleep. I just got really into the studies I was reading. I was like, I’m just gonna make some notes. I got home last night. I just make some notes. I’m like, oh, what was that study? And I pull this up and I start reading it. And then you pull up another one. I fell down just a Google hole of looking at gender gap studies. Awesome, which is delightful. I love
Zack Arnold: To hear that. That that excites me because because you guys are here to discuss a really important topic in our industry. We’re just going to go ahead and jump right into this thing. So I am joined today by Sean Fever and Kylie Wall, and the impetus for this conversation. This is definitely not a show that I had on my list of shows that I wanted to do on a regular basis. But a couple of weeks ago, there was an article that came out on Creative Cow by Kylie Wall that was called “Sexism in Post. Sexism in Video Production is making work environments hostile and keeping women away, but the most damaging sexist actions aren’t what you think. So I have Kylie here and I have Sean here to serve as her counterpart. So we’re going to talk about a really delicate topic today, which is sexism in post. So, guys, thank you so much for being here. One of you really early in the morning, and one of you really late at night. So, thank you.
Sian Fever: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you for having us on.
Kylee Wall: Yes, thanks for trying to continue a conversation.
Zack Arnold: So, Kylie, since you are the one that wrote this article, let’s just start right there and tell me where this article came from and why you wrote it
Kylee Wall: Last year at NAB in 2013, I I noticed that there weren’t that many women there, and so I wrote this short little article about where are all the women, or I think the title of it was where all the ladies at NAB, and it generated a lot of conversation, and a lot of it was guys saying, well, they would be there if they wanted to, and I was like, I don’t really think so, because there are women working and stuff around. But I mean, it’s just the the industry is the trade show floor is very hostile. So I was starting to think about that and started to think about how that relates to everyday life. So then the next year, when I went back, I was a little more aware and I had studied a little more and put together a group of women and other minorities and stuff. We got together at NAB and kind of talked about this. And I realized that people were really passionate about it, about creating better work environments for for women in post production. Like it wasn’t just me noticing this, and it wasn’t like a lot of people say, you’re making gender an issue by bringing it up all the time, and it’s like, no, it actually is an issue. I’m like, it’s not just made up. So I’ve been pondering this article for a long time, and it seemed like every time I would start to go down a road writing it, something really horrible would happen to women. Like there was that horrible shooting where, or I guess I need to be more specific now, but there was a horrible shooting where a guy shot some women because they turned him down, and then this whole GamerGate thing where people are attacking women in video games and stuff. So I was like, okay, this all comes down to society and this culture of sexism that’s really casual that people just accept because they grow up with it and they internalize it and they just say, well, that’s the way it is, and so it’s like, no, that’s not the way it has to be. So that’s what I’m trying to bring light to, specifically to our industry. There are other articles out there about. Casual latent sexisms, but I wanted to really highlight it in post because people. I think a lot of people think that you know. Well, I was hired by a girl, or I know a girl editor, so therefore sexism is over. You know, or women’s lib is over, like because women can vote, or you know, stupid things like that.
Zack Arnold: Well, I know that one thing that you mentioned specifically and very blatantly in your article is you talk about like the the showgirls and the bikinis in front of like the red camera booth, and there was an article, a print like print article or advertisement from Black Magic Design where it was a bunch of guys shooting, I think just like something on set, and there there was randomly this bikini girl in the back behind the window, just like staring at them, and that’s one really blatant form of sexism where you can just point to and say, “Guys, this is kind of unacceptable. But that, to me, is really easy and obvious to talk about. And what I really liked about your article is that it really was very little about that. So I’m going to read a little passage about this, and then I just kind of want you guys to run with it. So, on the heels of all the talk about the trade shows and the blatant sexism, you say this is not the kind of sexism I think is hurting our industry the most, from my experience. Because sometimes sexism isn’t what you think it is. It’s systematic. It’s passive. It’s cultural. Everyone participates in it every day. So, tell me a little bit about the sexism that we don’t see.
Kylee Wall: I think that’s a really interesting thing to talk about because I know that Sean and I went back and forth on that a little bit in an email thread specifically about how to say something like that. Because what I meant was that trade shows are kind of like the smaller bubble and they represent the industry and it’s it’s bad, but it’s not something that affects every single person. It’s kind of like the symptom to the to the disease. Do you want to answer that one, Sean?
Sian Fever: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I’d love to pick up some other points that you you’ve mentioned. And Zack, when you introed the podcast, you talked about how you wanted us to to talk about this, and that’s a fantastic way to tackle this problem and this problem that we’ll go into, but by listening and by giving women a platform to tell you their stories is is already a fantastic step. So thank you for giving us that opportunity because it’s invaluable. And the second point that I wanted to address was when Kylie, when you when you said that when people their feedback to you when you’re talking about gender and the gender is to say, well, you know, you’re bringing up, so you’re making it an issue, and that’s a very common thing to say, and that stems not that doesn’t not just gender. It can be race. It can be sexuality. I, I am color blind. I don’t see race, so therefore I’m not part of the problem. I don’t see homophobia, so I am not part of the problem. And that is a false statement. What you’re actually saying is it doesn’t affect me, so I don’t notice it. Not that it doesn’t exist, and I just wanted to bring that up because that that that is the problem. Is that the people that are part of the majority group, unfortunately, aren’t aware that this is going on, and so projects like everyday sexism on Twitter and generally the rise of the internet has made these stories available to everyone, and have made these experiences available, which is an incredibly important development in hopefully what will be our quest for equality. So, I just wanted to address those two things, and also, Zack, you’re not alone in kind of wondering what is this latent sexism? What is what does it look like? What are we experiencing? And to a degree, we are also figuring it out because we all live in a sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist society. We’ve grown up with this, and one of the best things I ever heard anyone say on a panel about sexism on the internet was that we we’ve all grown up in this society. We’ve all grown up. We are all sexists. We are all racists. We are all homophobes, and we are just trying to work out how not to be jerks. You know, we’re all in the same boat. You know, we’re just on in different parts of the spectrum, maybe in different parts of being on the receiving end of that treatment. And sometimes asking women, you know, like what? So, what is sexism? What are you experiencing? Because we have grown up with it, it’s a little bit like asking goldfish what water looks like. You know, if you’ve always been surrounded by it, sometimes it’s actually a little bit tricky, a little bit tricky to suss out.
Zack Arnold: I am a lover of analogies, and I’m going to collect that one and put it at the top of my list. That is brilliant. Oh, asking a goldfish what water looks like-I mean, that is just one of the best analogies I have ever heard. I mean, you can use that for so many things, but to use it in this example, I think is fantastic. And I will say, I’m basically going to be the punching bag in this one because I’m, you know, I’m the guy. But basically, what you just said explains me, which is somebody that I was raised. Not seeing class, not seeing color, not seeing you know sexual preference. So I I would be the kind of person that when I look at this article, I will be the first to admit, oh, I guess I never thought about this being a problem because the environment that I create in my immediate world doesn’t have these problems. Because I mean the vast majority of people that I’ve worked with that I actually prefer working with are females. Natalie Baker, my editor, my assistant editor, she’s a female. The editor of Go Far, my documentary, was a female. I’ve been hired by females, but then when you guys say, “Well, somebody’s saying that, like you had made a comment in your article, that’s adding but in front of those comments. So that makes me wonder: Is this something that even I am perpetuating in a certain way because I kind of don’t see it because I am the goldfish in water. But when I read this article, I started looking at the work environment that I’m in on my show, and it’s a really good work environment. But it is a total boys’ club, and I’m thinking to myself, this is just kind of the way that it is everywhere that I’ve ever worked. And I started thinking, why is post production so male dominant? And I don’t know the answer to it now. I don’t know if anybody does, but me trying to come up with an answer is almost useless. Why do you guys think that post production is such a boys’ club? God,
Sian Fever: That’s a riddle, isn’t it? I think we had the answer to that. You know, we we’d be doing we’d be doing great. I think I think the first thing probably to address is that I can’t speak for all women. One, I may be a woman, but that doesn’t stop me being sexist. And this is not necessarily a men versus women issue. I know plenty, if not as many, male feminists as I do female feminists,
Kylee Wall: And I know just as many women that are completely against this whole thing existing too.
Sian Fever: Absolutely! Wow, where to begin? I think if we look at the the rate of adoption of new software within post production, I think we can probably see that it’s a very slow moving kind of area, and it does seem to be lagging behind other industries as well. I’ve I spoke to somebody in in HR in law recently and told her some of my kind of war stories, and she was genuinely horrified and hadn’t come up against anything like what I was telling her. So in terms of life experience, I think I can see that it’s lagging behind, and it’s just it’s slow moving. And people in post production tend to be in post production for life. So the opportunities that that life cycle that kind of to kind of insert new blood is a little bit slower than we might be seeing in other industries. Also, it’s a technical profession. We work with computers, and there’s a stereotype that women are not technical, and that’s something I’ve certainly butted my head against my career, my whole career. Well,
Zack Arnold: That’s a really interesting, and I didn’t mean to cut you off, but that kind of clicked a little bit of a light bulb off in my head, because editing was a completely female dominant industry if you go back several decades, because you needed quote unquote a woman’s touch, because they used to say that editing film was like sewing, so it was a very tactile, very creative, very you know soft touch kind of industry. And now it’s all about bits and bytes and keyboards. And that’s one really interesting insight I never never thought of was the shift in technology, which to me doesn’t equate to why all of a sudden it’s a male dominant industry. But that’s a really interesting point. I never thought of.
Sian Fever: Well, I would argue that while women may have been part of the early stages at editing, it was because it was considered an admin job, so it fitted into the stereotype of what was women’s work. And then when it became more of a creative thing, or it became more important, that shift is, I would say, was probably what shifted it from being women’s work, which was considered trivial, to men’s work, which is considered important less so than the technological shift. Do you see where I’m going with that?
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s interesting too. I’d never thought of that.
Kylee Wall: Yeah, a lot of people will cite that women were the first film editors as you know, like a thing that’s important, but it’s it’s more like it more persists the whole sexist argument because if you look at what the work they did was, it wasn’t anything like editing. It was like you said, admin work. It was low. What am I trying to say? There wasn’t any nobility to it.
Sian Fever: Yeah, and we see that across different industries as well. That’s actually something. Do you do you know that knitting started off being a craft mostly associated with men? It was considered incredibly skilled, and at some point, the emphasis on skill completely shifted, and it became women’s work. So this is this is something this is a phenomenon that we’re seeing in other areas as well, not just you know filmmaking. Yeah, to put some of this this timeline into historical context, women in the UK only got equal voting rights with men in 1928. 1928-that’s you know-that’s not even 100 years ago. We’ve had a lot of change in a very short space of time. I mean, when you think of a degree. Scheme of things, how long we’ve you know been on this planet for, and I find that fascinating. That marital rape was considered legal up until 1991.
Zack Arnold: Wow,
Sian Fever: That’s mind-boggling. Mind-boggling because
Zack Arnold: 1991 seems like yesterday,
Sian Fever: Right?
Zack Arnold: Maybe, maybe not if you’re 20 years old, because that’s when you were born. To anybody over 3019, 91 is like, oh yeah, I remember that. It was like five years ago. Oh wait, no, I’m old.
Sian Fever: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Industrial Revolution has played a huge part, and certainly in the UK, World War One had a huge, huge, huge influence in shifting these issues on because all the men went off to war, and there was a huge gap in terms of who was going to do the work, the factory work, who was going to keep the country going. So women filled that that gap, and then you you know everyone came back and went, oh oh women can do these jobs. We we never knew, you know. Well, yes, we’ve been telling you for some time, but you know you have to show a little bit like getting your edit notes for a client. You know sometimes you’ve got to show, not tell. Right. So what was the question? Sorry.
Zack Arnold: Oh, we didn’t even have a question. We’ve just been talking in circles. So, so yeah. If there was a question, I don’t remember it either, just because I’m so engrossed in the conversation. That’s
Sian Fever: Okay. Go on, Kylie. You take it.
Kylee Wall: This is so interesting. I’m just finding myself not not talking because I’m listening. Like, wow, really? Okay. Well, I have another observation about why maybe women aren’t as that. I think that’s what the original topic was. Why there aren’t as many women? Why is it so male dominated? I saw an interesting article on NPR last month about computer science and about how I didn’t know this that the number of women in computer science was way ahead of men until 1984. There were more women getting majors in computer science, and then it just dropped in 1984. And they were studying why this happened, and it lines up with the same time that personal computers showed up in the home. And the thing that lines up with that is that those were marketed towards boys and you know younger guys because they were like hobbyists, they were tinkering around and things like that, and it was thought to be you know something for boys. So at that point, it kind of became part of the culture that technology was for boys, and I thought that was really interesting. It’s kind of a correlation thing, so there’s not really hard data. But it’s interesting that the exact same time when those started being marketed to men is when women in computer science immediately dropped.
Sian Fever: That’s incredibly interesting.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, that is.
Sian Fever: When we’re talking about sexism in post, the issue goes way back in our timeline to when we are young girls and young boys, and the way that we are socialized and the messages that we internalize, that we take from the media around us, from the way that people treat us when we’re very very small. And the story that I always tell to illustrate this is when I was about seven. I was sat in the car with my mum, and my mum had just started to broach the topic of Sean. What do you want to be when you when you you’re older? And I’ve been thinking this over. I’ve been obsessing over this for quite some time. I’ve always been particularly career focused, and trying to work out what I’d be good at and where I should go and what I should do. And I thought, well, you’re very good at organizing things, very organized. Maybe I should be a secretary. Maybe I should be a personal assistant. And I sort of settled on this and thought that would be quite nice. And I would, I would be really good at helping someone else get organized and help someone else with their career, and and that seemed to be a good fit. And we’re in the car, and my mum asks me, and I tell her I think maybe I’d be a good personal assistant. And she looks at me and goes, “Do you not want to be the person with the personal assistant? And I swear to you, as soon as that sentence dropped and I understood what she was saying, it was like barn doors on my mind swung open, and I had up until that point thought that certain careers just weren’t available to me, that they just, for some reason, I had internalized this message that careers of importance, of complexity, of skill were not things that were going to be that were not options for me. And straight away, I answered back. Well, in that case, I’ll be a lawyer then. That, to me, is just mind-boggling that that that I witnessed that change in my own mind. That I already had, and you know, thought I might like to have a sort of high-powered job where I could march down the street in a suit and a briefcase. But I had self-censored the reason for that. It’s very likely because of the way that people talk to me, or the the messages that I got through watching television. I didn’t see anyone. I can’t think of a single female role model I saw growing up. It wasn’t until I think kind of Zena and Buffy and those types of shows that, as a as an adolescent, I saw more. Positive role models. I saw women with agency and confidence and leadership skills, and it’s incredibly important, incredibly important to introduce us to those ideas and to also introduce boys to those ideas as well. That has a huge effect.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I completely agree with all that, and I think that that that this is a completely different rabbit hole that we could jump into for hours and hours and hours, for sure. What I really want to do is kind of bring this back directly to personal experience, because it’s very clear that like sexism is not a problem in post production, but not anywhere else in any other industries. It’s not like wait, every other industry is progressive and post production isn’t. I mean, this is just a microcosm of what’s still happening in all the different industries around, but post is the world that we know. So the kind of the next two things that I want to talk about are number one, and this is something I was talking about with my assistant Natalie tonight because I’d mentioned what tonight’s show was about. So my first question is going to be about adapting and kind of how you find you have to adapt yourself to this environment if you’re working as a female, and then number two, if you guys are comfortable with it, and if you’re not, we don’t have to go there. But I think for a lot of the people that are listening, saying, “Geez, I didn’t realize there was a problem at all, I think they need to actually hear that this stuff is happening every day and what it looks like, because they like like there was a line that you had in your article that I thought really summed it up, Kylie, which was, “Oh, well, that’s just boys being boys, right? And that’s like Mad Men style thinking. And so I kind of want to get a sense of what you guys feel as females you have to do to adapt and fit in in post production. And if you do actually have horror stories you’re willing to share, I think it’s really important for both females and mails to hear what’s happening, not in 1991 or 1984, but 2014. I think that’s important for people to hear.
Kylee Wall: Well, I’ll say that one thing you have to do, or I’ve found is important for adaptability, is you just have to recognize that as a minority, you have all the attention brought on you. So if you fail, your failure is exponential. But if you succeed, it’s like well, okay, you know, whatever. It’s kind of like you can stand out, you can stand apart from the crowd, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. You have to work really hard to to show that you’re worthy of being there because you’re not like everyone else. I’ve I’ve found it’s it’s really hard to try to think for me so far. It’s been difficult to think of how I’ve had to adjust or how I adapt because it’s so like steeped into everyday stuff. I’ve had to really think hard about the different things that I do that I actually do and I don’t even realize. So I’ve been kind of thinking about that a lot this summer about little things and noticing the things that people say to me, and I’m like, you know, that’s not really appropriate now that I think about it.
Sian Fever: Yeah, I think I have noticed from the start of my career when I was a junior and assistant up until now, there is a general distrust, and as I’ve said before, I’m a short form editor, and so I have multiple clients in one week, and I sometimes I’ll have a new client every week, so I’m constantly in a position where I’m sat with somebody new who doesn’t know me, who doesn’t know my experience, and I can see them making assumptions about my skill level, about my understanding of story, about my understanding of the technicalities of of editing and using software. Certainly, early on, it was assumed by default, absolutely by default, almost unanimously. Like almost every experience, every time I met a new person, they would absolutely assume that I didn’t know what I was doing. They would absolutely assume that I was incompetent until I proved otherwise. So that has changed as I have developed in my career, because now I have certain credits. I’m represented by a certain agency. I work at a particular level, and so it is less obvious. But I certainly am met. I’m met by default with a little bit of doubt, but it’s certainly gotten better as I’ve as I’ve progressed, and I think that’s to do with the progression and to do with you’re kind of vouched for. I think at a certain point, if you’re working in a particular workplace with a particular group of people, you know you’ve sort of been vouched for. But that’s definitely one big thing: is distrust, automatic distrust, and there was a study that I.
Kylee Wall: Sorry, I was saying I’ve definitely experienced that too.
Sian Fever: Yeah, to bring that outside of experience and to and to sort of quantify that, I suppose there was a study that Sheryl Sandberg cited in her book Lean In that concluded that men, when they were interviewed for a job, they were judged on their potential to do the job, whereas all things being equal, women were judged on their proven ability already to do the job, and I think that quite neatly sums up this this distrust phenomenon that men are sort of automatically given the benefit of the doubt, and women are really really. So, in terms of adapting to that or dealing with that, rather, because even asking us the question of how we adapt assumes that we are willing to. And to be honest, I’m not willing to adapt per se. I’m willing to battle through it, but I don’t think the solution is to become or act like a man. It is to forge. It’s just to forge forward and do our own thing, come hell or high water. I think it’s up to society to sort of adjust to us rather than to us for swing to swing the other way. Do you see what I mean?
Zack Arnold: I know exactly what you mean, and what you had said about the the hiring practices. I think it kind of goes back to what Kylie was saying. It’s kind of like somebody’s hiring a man, judging him on his ability to succeed, and you’re hiring a woman, judging her on her ability or inability to fail. Right? Like just waiting for them to fail, as opposed to waiting for the man to succeed, which I think is interesting. And I’ve
Sian Fever: Absolutely
Zack Arnold: Like I’m hearing all this, and it’s just like, what planet do I live on? Because the the neuron, the neural connections that create these thoughts do not exist in my head. Like they don’t even occur to me. Yeah. So I right now I’m the goldfish in the water, and somebody’s saying, “What does the water look like? And I’m like, “My God! But then I think about it, and it makes sense. It’s just not. It’s not a mindset that I understand, but it’s something that everybody’s living in, so I’m trying to really get to the bottom of it and see, just you know what, like for example, I was talking to to Natalie, like I said tonight, and I had asked her, I’m like, geez, you should be on the show, and she unfortunately couldn’t make it, but she had told me that even on the show that we’re doing now on Empire, we were really lucky in that we’re in a space where we basically have all the video post production in one area, so online color correction. Everything is right down the hall. There’s no driving to a post house, and we basically can do remote sessions where we can we have remote connection between the edit bays and the color room. So if we want to view a cut like in the theater room, we can just remotely hit play, stop whatever, and do it in the color bay. And there was somebody demonstrating how that worked, and we had two other assistants that were male and her, and she said that what happened is that the color guy was demonstrating kind of how the console worked because it’s not as simple as hitting the space bar for a play, and he showed it to the first two guys and you know just kind of said, well, here do this, this, and this, and they did it, and then she walked up there and he kind of pushed her aside. It’s like, okay, now listen. This is how you do this, and this is how you push that. And she felt like he was very condescending to her. And the only thing that she could really see was that it was because she was a woman. And I think what she, what Natalie Doubley has against her is that she looks extremely young. She’s not, but literally, she looks like she’s 14 years old. She’s really blessed with amazing genetics, and she looks like she’s literally in high school. And I think that that may have been part of it too. But there’s certainly gender involved. So is that something that you guys feel you experience on a regular basis, where people just assume you probably don’t know as much because you’re female?
Sian Fever: Frighteningly regular. Absolutely. Frighteningly regular. In fact, it’s it’s something I experience on a daily basis, but if if you’re meeting someone new, once people get to know you, it completely dissipates. And to kind of address your previous question of how to deal with that, and addressing what Kylie said about how we really have the weight of our gender on our shoulders, if we fail, everybody fails. You know, it’s a judgment on our gender if we fail. Zack, if you fail, then it’s Zack the individual has failed, not men. You know, as a group. If Kylie or I fail, then it’s very much oh well, women are rubbish editors. Then that is sexism. And so the way that I counter that is just to be as on the ball as possible, be as prepared as possible, and just and meet them, meet them head on, and try to, in a subtle way, demonstrate my competency. Let them know, like you would anyone, that they are in safe hands. I’ve noticed with female clients, it takes minutes that that little shuffle. It’s not quite a power play. It’s like a a sort of maneuvering around each other and trying to work out. Well, what do you know? And what do you know? And with female clients, it happens within minutes. With male clients, it normally takes hours. But it will normally happen same day, and then you’re you’re fine. But it’s something that happens with alarming regularity.
Kylee Wall: Yeah, my best examples for that. Since I work with the same crew every day, I’m lucky with that. I don’t have to deal with proving myself every day. So my best example recently would be probably actually going back to NAB when I was working a trade show booth and a really technical booth. It was like almost every person that came up there would would basically it was almost like they were asking to talk to my dad or something like oh she doesn’t she doesn’t know what she’s talking about hey is the is someone available to tell me about this and I’m like well I know about that oh and then they’d kind of humor me and then we’d go down that path and they’d be like okay so she actually does know what she’s talking about so that was. That was really weird to experience firsthand like that, being transparent like that.
Sian Fever: Yeah, people don’t hang on to this. People aren’t willfully prejudiced, I don’t think, in the majority. So once you kind of meet that issue and it’s it’s dispelled, you know, it’s gone, which is great. But it’s just like this
Kylee Wall: Latent sexist thing that you just kind of inherently like something deep inside you says, “Oh, it’s a woman, you know. That’s like a warning sign somewhere in you. It’s not like you’re not like thinking it actively, like “Oh, great, a girl, but something in your culture is telling you, or somebody, not me, but yeah,
Sian Fever: Yeah. So, so so definitely the link between kind of sexism and technology, and we’re seeing this also in STM career paths as well. We’re not alone in post production, but that is definitely one of the main obstacles that that I face. That you know, and generally people, not people, sorry. How should I say this? Inappropriate behavior, shall we say? Sometimes it wanders into sexual harassment. Sometimes it wanders into threatening behavior. I had a very upsetting incident this year where I was paired with a producer, and he was incredibly cruel. That cruelty turned into threatening, and then I had a very kind of distressing edit, made it to the end, finished the job, and then I went to report this incident to the powers that be, and was kind of patted on the head and said, “Oh yes, sorry, we know about him. He’s a misogynist. We can’t actually put him with women because this is how he treats them, and they’d knowingly put us together. And the kind of anger and the hatred that he was displaying was pretty. I have never experienced that before. That’s something that I think plays into this. Is that most commonly working in closed rooms, the door is closed, and we’re working in pairs or small groups, and that’s another reason why, Zack, you may not be experiencing or seeing these things happen in front of you because they don’t happen in the spaces that you inhabit.
Zack Arnold: Well, yeah, I inhabit my own 10 by 10 space for 14 hours a day, and I basically talk to Natalie and go to her office, and she comes to mine, and that’s pretty much it. So that’s part of the reason is it’s such a sheltered industry that we work in because we don’t work with a lot of other people, and we work in our own personal dark space all day long. So that’s a really good point. Part of the reason I don’t see it is because I don’t work in post production. I’m an editor, and I work in a tiny room, but I don’t work in an industry. I don’t go to trade shows, so I don’t really see this stuff firsthand. But kind of going back to what you’d said about the the guy, where they kind of pat you on the head and say, “Oh yeah, he’s he’s a misogynist. We know we don’t like him working with women. What makes me more angry, and what seems to be like Kylie and I had talked about offline before this, is that we’re not trying to point at the disease. We’re trying to find the root of the problem. Rather than saying, “Well, we can’t put him with women, somebody should be asking, “Well, why is he getting a paycheck at all in the first place, because if you if you know this about the guy and he’s this big of a dick, you should not be employing him and giving him money. So that to me kind of points to a root cause rather than the symptom. Like where is the symptom coming from? And if there are people allowing producers like that to work in this industry, that’s where the problem starts. Like that to me is a major issue.
Sian Fever: Yeah, big time, and I think that feeds back into the boys will be boys attitude. This kind of would do we say biological determinism? This this kind of inevitability that because somebody is of a particular gender, they will act a certain way, and it’s just the way that it is. It just happens, and that isn’t true, and it does men a complete disservice. Men are not slaves to their their biology or a particular way of thinking. They’re not like I’m going to go on a limb here and say like we love dudes, like we love you guys. You know, we we don’t we don’t think you’re all horrible, you know. And we need gentlemen. We need you very much. We need male allies in this, and we need your support. And men are absolutely part of the solution. Absolutely, no doubt. You know, this isn’t a male versus female issue.
Zack Arnold: Well, one thing that I can, and this is going back to what you said like five or 10 minutes ago. There were like 20 times that I wanted to interrupt you, but I realized I probably shouldn’t, and I should let you talk. And you know, you sound you sound relatively like you know what you’re talking about. So I’m going to be going backwards. I usually don’t like to do that, but I just kind of wanted I wanted to let you run with it. But you talked about you had both talked about the idea of kind of feeling like you had to prove yourself, and that’s something that I can relate to. I’m not going to step out and say that I know what it’s like to deal with sexism because I’m white, I’m male, I have dark blonde hair and blue eyes. So if there’s an enemy on this planet, I’m the enemy. To every other race, gender, creed, like I am it, I’m as bad as it gets. You’re
Sian Fever: At the top of the privilege tree. Exactly.
Zack Arnold: But the one thing I can totally relate to is the feeling that you get. You’re trying to prove yourself, and the story that popped into my head was when I first got hired on to burn notice, whatever it was, five or six years ago. Nobody outside of the people that hired me thought I could do the job. I didn’t have anything on my resume that proved that I could do the job, and at the time, I was only being hired to cover for somebody for one episode, maybe two at the most, right? And I walked in there my first day, and I, I didn’t lie, but I’d kind of fibbed about my level of experience on Avid because I learned on Avid, and I’d cut on Avid for two or three years, but then I spent eight years straight on Final Cut Pro Seven, and literally didn’t touch Avid once, and I walked in on day one, and I had no idea how to do anything, and the assistant that they had paired me with was somebody that had been on the show for a year, was older than I was, and I was going into him saying, “How do I add an audio keyframe? And he would kind of look at me. He’s like, “Oh my God, how did this guy get the job? Right, like I just was not proving myself. And for those 10 days that I was doing my first cut, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I was petrified of the fact that I didn’t feel comfortable with the software. But more importantly, everybody literally was just watching and waiting for me to fail. And as soon as they saw my first cut, it was basically holy shit! Who is this guy? We got to keep him around, and the rest is history. And I was on the show for four years. But when I look at those first 10 days, they were miserable. And when I think about that, when it’s more about gender roles and just the fact that I was in an unusual situation, there are people in this industry that are females that must live with feeling like that every single day. And that has got to be hard.
Sian Fever: It is tricky. I would say the experiences differ ever so slightly, in that I walk into a job knowing I can do it. I’m. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, Zack. But
Zack Arnold: By all means, blow your trumpet. We blow our horns here in America, but you blow your trumpet.
Sian Fever: That’s pretty great, you know. So this is go. But I, I had a good handle on what I’m doing. I understand my software. I feel very confident when talking to clients. I often have five or six clients in a room at the same time who are barking orders. I end up in very high pressure situations because the turnover, the cycle is so quick and so rapid, and I can handle myself, and that’s fine. And so it’s more of a frustration. It’s more you’re waiting for the other person to catch on, and it’s frustrating rather than being upsetting or nerve wracking or feeling like the stakes are high. You’re just you’re playing a waiting game, and it’s it’s frustration.
Kylee Wall: Right. You just said exactly what I was going to say. Good job. No, it’s fine. You’re you’re like ready to go, and early in your day, and I’m just like what? And just for
Zack Arnold: Anybody listening, it is like 530 in the morning for Sean. So if if she’s this amped up now, like you must be badass in the edit suite because I I would be a lump of nothing at this time of day if we’re doing a podcast. And I will let everybody on the show know that you and I have never actually met in person, but between watching some of your work online and seeing some photos of you working, I can vouch and say Sean is total 100% badass. So I’m now hearing it in your voice that you’re like, “Hey, man, don’t mess with my ability. I can cut. So I like to hear that-that’s-that’s good.
Sian Fever: Thank you so much.
Episode Credits
This episode was edited (with a REALLY fast turnaround) by Bart Walczak, and the show was executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.
The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.