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an interesting question of gender page 1/2

The issue of gender representation within screen based industries has been an ongoing concern for WIFT(victoria). This manifested itself in Women In Motion as the question of whether or not boys should be included in the audience.

"What is a rude group of adolescent blokes doing in here?"
(Evaluation Summary, Activities and Finance Final Report 1993)

Given the theory behind Women in Motion, it is unsurprising that the question of whether or not the audiences should include boys as well as girls was an ongoing debate. The organisers of Women In Motion have every year come to terms with this by allowing boys to come, but firmly placing the emphasis of the entire event on the opportunities for, and experiences of, women. Whilst the vast majority of the audiences were female, boys were never actively excluded,

"...that was always an interesting question, should we exclude boys. I went through that over and over again, like every year that we got boys who were a pain in the ass, and we'd always get a few, I would think, oh you know next year I wonder if we should exclude boys completely? And we never did decide to exclude them, I mean there was partly a feeling that for the ones who came, and who weren't disruptive in any way, it was terrific...it was a great education for them too, and usually they were very outnumbered which usually kept them quiet which was good...if there is only a handful of boys then it means the girls are the ones who are asking most of the questions. Which is good, that's the way we want it to be in this particular context. But occasionally we'd get these large mixed groups where the boys would be loud and obnoxious or would be try to be disruptive or we had a bit of that. Not too much." (Marsha Emerman 2000)

In the long run the involvement of boys in Women in Motion was believed to be beneficial, given the aims of WIFT(victoria) are not simply about raising the actual percentages of women working in screen based industries, but changing attitudes as well. The young boys coming to Women in Motion were exposed to a group of confident, successful women who were working in a traditionally male dominated industry: "...they'd being seeing a crew of very competent women in charge and it was all women that were actually running these things and the films, yeah I thought it was, it was definitely a good education for them as well." (Marsha Emerman 2000)

Whilst it was felt that the overall success of the program was only enhanced by their presence, the young women involved remained the focus:

"[it]...was pitched completely to opportunities for young women to get into this business that was entirely the focus, so really..., they stood to benefit the most from it and that was very clearly intentioned." (Sue Maslin 2000)