“This decade [has] to be about women having each other’s backs,” said Kate Winslet in her Sept. 19 Emmy acceptance speech for HBO’s Mare of Easttown. Around the world, the international film and television industry’s most powerful women had already been hard at work with that mission. Female producers, studio executives and channel bosses are seeing a historic opportunity to capitalize on the seismic changes wrought by the #MeToo movement to push for true inclusion and diversity across the entertainment business.
But impressive advances in onscreen representation have not been matched by gains in corporate power structures, where, at least at the very top and particularly outside the United States, it is still very much a man’s world. “A lot of work needs to be done in the C-suite, where serious decisions are made,” notes Mo Abudu, CEO of pan-African TV conglomerate EbonyLife Media.
