The Female Lead Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Foreword

  Meryl Streep

  Leymah Gbowee

  Christine Lagarde

  Yeonmi Park

  Ava DuVernay

  Lucy Bronze

  Christiane Amanpour

  Brenda Berkman

  Lynsey Addario

  Limor Fried

  Sallie Krawcheck

  Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe

  Nell Merlino

  Vian and Dr Deelan Dakhil Saeed

  Sheila Nevins

  Clare Smyth

  Michaela DePrince

  Rebecca Root

  Tavi Gevinson

  Laurene Powell Jobs

  Samantha Power

  Julie Bentley

  Lena Dunham

  Mickalene Thomas

  Mhairi Black

  Jo Malone

  Roya Mahboob

  Tina Brown

  Franchesca Ramsey

  Lady Barbara Judge

  Michelle Kaufmann

  Sandy Powell

  Weili Dai

  Ramona Pierson

  Taryn Davis

  Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

  Clarissa Ward

  Tracy Edwards

  Prof Nazneen Rahman

  Katharine Viner

  Reshma Suajani

  Kat Kaelin

  Baroness Gail Rebuck DBE

  Nimco Ali

  Karlie Kloss

  Minda Dentler

  Dame Athene Donald

  Masha Gessen

  Dr Vanessa Ogden

  Dr Cori Bargmann

  Helena Morrissey

  Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher

  Laura Bates

  Yvette Vega

  Jude Kelly

  Majora Carter

  Vanessa Friedman

  Ashima Shiraishi

  Acknowledgements

  About the Project

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Sixty inspirational women, from many walks of life. All have changed the world in a variety of fields. Among them are politicians and artists, journalists and teachers, engineers and campaigners, fire fighters and film stars. Together they form an arresting gallery of portraits, each one illustrated with original photography by Brigitte Lacombe.

  Some have led their professions; some have broken new ground for women; some have inspired changes through relentless endeavour. All were chosen for their ambitions and achievements and all tell their stories in their own words.

  For girls, it can be hard to identify role models in our society. This book will help and inspire women everywhere to realize their hopes and ambitions.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Data science entrepreneur Edwina Dunn has always been fascinated by people’s stories and motivations. As the co-founder of the first grocery loyalty programme, she knows first-hand what it feels like to work in a male-dominated industry. She co-founded the company dunnhumby twenty-five years ago and created the not-for-profit project The Female Lead in 2015. The project aims to tell a new set of positive stories in order to drive real change and inspire the next generation of women.

  www.thefemalelead.com

  Brigitte Lacombe is known for her influential and revelatory portraiture. For the past four decades, she has created iconic and intimate photographs of our most celebrated artists, actors, politicians and intellectuals. She has published photo-essays and portraits in such publications as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Financial Times Magazine, and Zeit Magazin. Recently, exhibitions of her work were presented by Phillips Auction house in New York, Paris and London and the Shanghai Center of Photography. Monographs include Lacombe Anima/Persona (Steidl/Dangin) and Lacombe Cinema/Theater (Schirmer/Mosel). She received The Lifetime Achievement Award for Photography in 2010 from The Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and The Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Travel & Portraiture in 2012.

  www.brigittelacombe.com

  INTRODUCTION

  A celebration of women’s achievement, endeavour and diversity, The Female Lead shows how women shape the world. Founded by data science entrepreneur Edwina Dunn, this non-profit project aims to make women’s stories more visible, and to provide positive role models for future generations, nurturing young women’s confidence and ambition in all spheres. The Female Lead works across three platforms – the website, thefemalelead.com; an outreach programme that puts on workshops in schools, colleges and youth organisations; and this book of interviews with 60 remarkable women. Each interviewee tells her story in her own words, explaining how she became the person she is today and offering her insights into what she has learned along the way. The book is illustrated with powerful, original portraits by world-renowned photographer Brigitte Lacombe, each accompanied by a short filmed interview made by documentary film maker Marian Lacombe.

  * * *

  We three writers entrusted with interviewing the women whose stories make up this book can count up over a century of years between us of interviewing people from all walks of life. But we found, during the course of writing this book, that there wasn’t a single interview that didn’t give us something new to think about or amaze us in some way, in which we didn’t discover a fresh point of view, or marvel at an impressive story. These accounts speak to all women, and the richness and variety of the different personalities profiled in these pages made our work on this project a pleasure.

  Each woman was asked to select an item that had particular personal significance for her, and to explain her choice and its association with her success. A number of the interviewees picked something that had belonged to a female family member whom they admired; others chose objects with symbolic value, such as a wild bird to represent freedom; others settled on something that summed up their professional life or a personal skill or trait or passion. The variety of the objects reflects the eclecticism of the women – and that diversity is one of the key elements of the project.

  Our female leads range widely in terms of age. The youngest interviewed was 14 when she spoke to us, and all decades from teens to 70s are represented. They are also diverse in terms of nationality – the territories they come from include the UK, the US, Europe, Uganda, Afghanistan, Liberia, Iraq, China and North Korea – and in terms of what they do. In the following pages you will meet politicians, activists, businesswomen, scientists, sportswomen, writers and film-makers, as well as a soldier, a firefighter and a model.

  There are, however, common threads. One is a frequent element of struggle and the overcoming of adversity. Some of these women have lived through war and suffered its consequences; for others, the battle has been fought in the workplace; for others again, the struggle has been a personal one for success or recognition. All our interviewees are winners, whether their names command global recognition or they are relatively unknown outside their fields, where they invariably challenge old ideas and lead discussion and innovation. They break the mould and, with their determination and courage, inspire others to do likewise.

  Something else that unites these women is their grace. They were all unfailingly courteous and generous with their time, and committed to this project’s core theme, which is supporting and encouraging young women. Many benefited from having female mentors along the way and are keen for younger women to benefit similarly. All are sensitive and sympathetic to the issues faced by young women in the 21st century, and all are optimistic about the future, especially regarding the lives and roles of the young women who will come after them.

  Geraldine Bedell

  Rosanna Greenstreet

  Hester
Lacey

  EDWINA DUNN

  Founder, The Female Lead

  FOREWORD

  One of the most pressing questions for the parent – or teacher or mentor – of a young girl is, ‘How do I preserve her natural-born curiosity, drive and courage?’ All too often we see the vibrant engagement of the emerging girl quashed by low expectations or rigid roles, battered by self-doubt in adolescence or subsumed by the demands of motherhood. In spite of the enormous social gains throughout the last century, women in many societies continue to be denied education, sexual integrity and independence. Inequality is so embedded in culture that unconscious bias infects the encouragement offered even to girls and women lucky enough to have families and teachers rooting for them. The Female Lead offers an antidote to such prejudice. By presenting the stories of 60 ambitious and successful women, this volume offers a rich register of diverse personal histories, interests, challenges and goals. The focus is not on leading others, but on taking the lead in shaping a life of one’s own. The power of this volume lies in its presentation of female drive and direction as normal.

  * * *

  This norm cannot be taken for granted. In my early years as a student of psychology I was introduced to disturbing and disorienting bias against ‘the female lead’ through one particular study. A list of personality traits and a brief questionnaire were sent to three different groups of psychotherapists. Each group included both men and women. The first group was asked to describe the ‘mature, healthy, socially competent man’. The second group was asked to describe the ‘mature, healthy, socially competent woman’. The third group was asked to describe the ‘mature, healthy, socially competent adult’ with no gender specified. The first group indicated that the mature, healthy male would be in control of his feelings, rational (able to distinguish thought from emotion), assertive, capable of leadership and willing to dominate a situation. The second group agreed that the mature, healthy female would be quick to display emotion, would endorse the emotional rather than logical side of the argument, would be susceptible to influence, would in all likelihood be conceited and spend a great deal of time thinking about her appearance, and would be unlikely to take on a leadership role.

  The bias demonstrated by these differences was bad enough, but the real blow came from the third category. The mature, healthy adult turned out to be completely indistinguishable from the mature, healthy male. The mature, healthy female, in other words, was a different kind of creature from a mature, healthy adult. In a culture that incorporates a narrow, less than adult concept of grown women, the effect is of silencing, blindness and constraint – silencing because what she says does not have authority; blindness because the full range of what she is able to do and what she might want to do is denied; and constraint because when she take steps towards autonomy, leadership and control, taking that person outside restricted social norms, she is seen as abnormal, unhealthy.

  The focus is not on leading others, but on taking the lead in shaping a life of one’s own.

  Although this study was done several decades ago, current and strong evidence indicates that these biases persist. Very recent research shows that bias does not just act on us via other people’s minds; bias threatens us from the inside, too. We often hear that young women today are higher achievers, more goal-directed and more confident than men; but even women of this century reveal vulnerabilities to bias against female achievement. When women are asked to record their gender at the beginning of a quantitative test, and are in a minority when they take the test, or have just watched a commercial in which women were behaving like airheads, or when they have just tried on a swimsuit as opposed to a sweater, then they perform less well than comparable women perform on the same test in more neutral conditions. Such cues do not generally affect men, because highlighting their gender does not trigger negative associations about mathematical ability.

  Recent research shows that girls and women are particularly vulnerable to bias against the female lead at specific crossroads. The first is in adolescence, when social pressures from friends, parents, adverts, films, television and magazines to have designer looks, to be liked and admired, to be a nice girl, put self-confidence at risk. Although today more and more adolescent girls are encouraged to succeed by teachers and parents, many find that entry to the workforce – the second turning point – is less welcoming. The support their ambition may have enjoyed during formal education disappears in the messier, more public workplace. A third juncture comes with experiences of motherhood, its surrounding social institutions and its profound emotional pull.

  Many women, at one stage or another, feel stuck or stranded, confounded about a way forward. Each path has to be mapped according to the dense particularity of a woman’s own desires, interests and opportunities. At one time, the buzz word for encouragement was ‘role model’, but the special challenges to women of competing needs, personal responsiveness and complex attachments, make role models problematic. No one person can draw a life map for another. What Edwina Dunn provides here is a rich register of possible ways forward. None is a universal template, but each account enlarges the sense of what is possible as, in her individual way, a girl comes to lead her own life.

  Dr Terri Apter

  MERYL STREEP

  Meryl Streep has been nominated for 19 Academy Awards, more than any other actor or actress in history. She has won three times – best supporting actress for Kramer vs Kramer (1979) and best actress for Sophie’s Choice (1982) and again for The Iron Lady (2011). Born in New Jersey and educated at Vassar College, Dartmouth College and Yale, Meryl Streep is widely regarded as the leading actress of her generation, not least for her ability to transform herself into a wide range of diverse characters. She has received 29 Golden Globe nominations, more competitive (non-honorary) nominations than any other actor or actress in the history of the award, and won eight times. In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts and, in 2014, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was a founding member of Mothers and Others, an environmental advocacy group, which successfully lobbied Congress for new regulations protecting children from the hazards of pesticide exposure. She has underwritten scholarships at colleges and universities, and funds a screenwriting programme for women over the age of 40 through New York Women in Film. In 2015, she sent every member of Congress a letter and a book, Equal Means Equal, supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the US Constitution designed to mandate equal rights for women under the law.

  * * *

  I grew up in New Jersey, in a suburb of a very small town – if there is such a thing – and it was my imagination that took me out of my circumstances and enabled me to understand the lives of other people in a way I found thrilling, whether that was through reading, or the things I saw on TV. I didn’t always want to be an actor. I thought I wanted to be a translator at the UN and help people understand each other. In a way, that’s what I’m trying to do as an actress – to get deep into someone else’s life, to understand what made them feel the way they did and compelled them to move in one direction or the other. I just find it endlessly interesting how different we are and how similar we all are.

  Some young people come into acting because they see it as glossy and heightened and more sort-of divine than their existence, and there are plenty of avenues to achieve that. But what interests me, and what interests the actors I admire most, is to understand something about yourself and other people. That other stuff, I’ve never liked it. I realise now I’m not going to. My mother used to say to me, ‘People would give their right arm to walk down that red carpet. Enjoy it!’ You just can’t change who you are.

  In the minds of the aggrieved male population, the word feminism sometimes qualifies as something for them to be defensive about, and I feel that men should be on the side of advancing half the human race.

  I got very involved in promoting the film Suffragette because it’s about a part of our history that’s not fam
iliar to everyone, and Sarah Gavron’s film told the story authentically, with honesty and beauty. There was some controversy at the time because I was asked in an interview whether I was a feminist and I answered by saying, ‘I’m a humanist,’ which, to me, encompasses advancing the rights of women and girls – being a feminist – and also being part of the human family. In the minds of the aggrieved male population, the word feminism sometimes qualifies as something for them to be defensive about, and I feel that men should be on the side of advancing half the human race. Until men think of discrimination as a problem that is their own – that’s to say, a human problem – I don’t think we’ll move forward. So that’s the challenge. Unless men are also discussing this, I don’t think anything changes. It’s not just a women’s issue – it’s an issue for everyone.

  On alternate days I feel completely despairing and then I think, ‘Wow, look how much has been achieved, how things are moving.’ The influencers in our industry are overwhelmingly men – the critics, the directors’ branch of the Academy. If the directors’ branch of the Academy were overwhelmingly female, there would be a hue and cry about it. Women have 17 per cent of the influence, more or less, in every part of the decision-making process in the movie industry and, inevitably, that’s going to decide what kinds of film are made. But the material that comes to me, often in the form of books and plays to be adapted, is still interesting. I’m 66, so I get mostly things for people of that age. There’s not a lot, but there are wonderful projects that would never have existed even ten years ago. Twenty years ago, I would have been playing witches and crones and scary old ladies in horror movies.

  If I could go back, I’d say, ‘Think about the bigger picture.’

  Acting and the sort of uncertain freelance career that I’ve had, going from job to job, never knowing exactly where the next one would be, has allowed me to spend a lot of time with my kids – more than if I’d worked at a desk job and had two weeks off in August and one at Christmas. That’s a really tough gig and I don’t know how I could have had four kids and done that. Decisions I made in my career were not always based on aesthetic criteria – was it near, was it going to be shot in the summer vacation? Then I would do it. You make all sorts of compromises as an artist in order to have this other thing that you value. My girls and my son and my husband are all way too much in each other’s business, I would say, but we’re close and that’s important. I always tried to stay challenged and work hard but also keep my hand in and stir the pot at home.