What trailblazers inspire me?  For International Women’s Day, I immediately thought of five world-changing, badass conservationists I met recently—women working in biodiversity hotspots to save their local habitat, species and communities to help save our planet.

As global citizens, we’re so lucky to have women like Awatef Abiadh working in North Africa, Ingrid Parchment working in Jamaica, Leah Mwangi in Kenya, Martika Tahi in Vanuatu and Le Thi Trang in Vietnam—check out their videos to learn more about the challenges they face and how they are bringing communities together to save biodiversity.  Biodiversity hotspots are Earth’s most biologically diverse yet threatened terrestrial areas. The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) empowers civil society organizations–with leaders like these fearless, focused women–to manage the global biodiversity crisis at a local level, one initiative at a time.

One of the great things about being a digital storyteller is learning about people who make a difference in our world, and thanks to @Interface Media Group (IMG) I was lucky enough to get to know these five inspiring women and their incredibly important environmental work, partly funded through grants from CEPF, as part of the IMG production team which produced the CEPF Hotspot Hero Awards videos and the entire virtual awards event where all 10 heroes were celebrated. Let me take this opportunity to shout out the incredibly talented creative team at IMG, including Director of Experience Design Jordana Well, Senior Project Manager/Line Producer Frankie Frankavilla, Director of Visual Effects Dave Taschler, Editors Luke Blackwell and Abbey Farkas, Sound Designer Dennis Jacobsen, and Sound Mixer Pavel Sinev—it takes a village to create great content!

You can watch the entire virtual awards event produced by IMG here and learn more about the important work of CEPF, their global partners, and all the Hotspot Heroes.

 

Patty Jenkins directs Wonder Woman

#Storytellers are #LEADERS in many cultures. They preserve the past. They envision the future. And they help us frame who we are. So why are so few women the leading storytellers of our times?

 
It’s not for lack of trying.
 
As the numbers from the recent USC Annenberg #Inclusion initiative shows that across 1,200 leading films, women only direct 4%. And numbers behind the camera are equally dismal. Despite small inroads, the film director’s chair remains white and male. Much like the CEO chair and the Boardroom Chair.
 
But, we also know that women make highly competent #leaders. Women score higher than men in most leadership skills.
 
So what’s the deal?
 
There is often a #confidence gap. Society’s confidence in us as leaders. And women’s confidence in our own story as leaders. Which affects our ability to hone leadership skills, find mentors and champions, negotiate for the better positions/pay, and own our leadership brand.
 
This fall I will be joined by several incredible women who have helped boost my own skills and confidence as a leader at our #GALSNGEAR Taking the Lead Women’s Career Accelerator Workshop this fall. Check out these carefully planned sessions to take your leadership to the next level—we’d love to have you! 
Please follow me @galsngear on instagram for up to the minute info on this and other initiatives to promote women in the media and film industry.

If you’ve been following the #GalsNGear hashtag on Twitter, then you know I’ve been working behind the scenes with many colleages–women and men across production and post–to put the focus on women in the technical fields of our industry during NABShow this year.   On our program, we’ll be featuring 14 top pro’s talking about VR, UAV, VFX, CC, 3D, and more. Plus we’ll be giving away thousaGnG_IG-Post1nds of dollars worth of cool stuff! We want to be sure these professionals get the limelight they deserve, and inspire the next generation of women working behind the lens in our industry.

NABShow in Las Vegas is an incredible annual smorgasboard in our sprawling industry of content creators and distributors in TV, video, cable, OTT, satellite and more. Or as I like to call it, 100,000 of my best friends in media. Special thanks to NAB and Women in Film & Video, and our partners Broadcast Beat Magazine, sponsors Black Magic Design, Snell Advanced Media, and Vitec, as well as supporting partners Adobe, iZotope, Zacuto, Ott House Audio, Rampant Design, Sundance Media Group, and Radiant Images.
If you’re coming to NAB, then we’ll see you at the show! (8:30AM is free coffee/donuts and networking, the show goes live at 9AM). If not, join us live online at 9AM. Broadcast Beat, our streaming partners, will be carrying us to more than 2M viewers in 180 countries! Details here.

Luisa Winters on GalsNGear NABSHOW Live 2016

Check out these amazing women joining us on stage to demo and discuss gear and content production and post-production this year:

Participating women:

Jennifer Pidgen, COO, Sundance Media Group; UAV Pilot

Céline Tricart, Cinematographer & VR Filmmaker

Nina Page, Head of Business Development, Radiant Images

Amanda Shelby, Head of Production, Radiant Images

Csilla Kozma, Head of Content, Nokia Technology

Cheryl Ottenritter, Senior Mixer/Founder, Ott House Audio

Mae Manning, Editor

Sue Lawson, Editor

Megan McGough Christian, Production Manager, “Frontline”, WGBH Boston

Stefanie Mullen, CEO, Rampant Design, Visual Effects

Sophia Kyriacou, Broadcast Designer/3D Artist

E Samantha Cheng, Executive Producer, Heritage Series, LLC

Co-Hosts:

Adryenn Ashley, CEO, Crowded TV

Amy DeLouise, Producer/Director, Author of The Producer’s Playbook: Real People on Camera

 

 

DeLouise teaching at NAB

I love speaking at NAB Show!

I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting loads of interesting people at #NABShow in Las Vegas this year! If you’re trying to track me down, here are a few of my plans:

Saturday, April 16th

After a business breakfast, I’ll be off to get my credentials, to see how our #GalsNGear event buttons turned out (12,000 of them at registration desks!) and be sure our T-shirts got delivered to the store. Yes, guys are invited, too. See details under Tuesday below. Then for the afternoon I’m speaking at Post|Production World on Knocking it Out of the Park as a #SetPA an In-Depth Session on Essential Business Skills for the Freelancer. Then it’s off to an annual get-together convened by the ever-amazing editor Nicole Haddock.

Sunday, April 17th

I’ve got an early launch to speak at 8:30AM on Stress-Free Productions: Managing Clients and Executive Producers.   Then I’ve got a little gap, so if you want to grab coffee or an early lunch (love the little Indian place in South Hall) that would be great! Then it’s off to speak all afternoon at PPW: Career Transitions for CreativesSo You Want to Produce. Then it’s off to some private parties and one of my favorite Vegas shows, Jersey Boys.

Monday, April 18th

This day is gonna be fun but tiring. I’ll be speaking with @Adryenn and @RodHarlan in an All-Day Social Media Symposium ! Then it’s off to moderate a panel on a subject that’s important to me Creating Inclusive Work Environments with Douglas Spotted Eagle, Gayle Hurd of the National Association of Black Journalists, Sarah Serrano of Veterans in Film and Television.  Then it’s off to Media Motion Ball!

Tuesday, April 19th

This is gonna be quite a day. I hope you can join me in the morning for some coffee and donuts provided by Black Magic Design at the first #GalsNGear pop-up event, livestreamed by Broadcast Beat. Then I’m off to speak at PPW again: Budgeting Basics for Video, Putting Real People on Camera — a topic so dear to my heart I wrote a book about it! I’ll head over to the NAB Bookstore for a book-signing (please stop by! invite friends!) for The Producer’s Playbook: Real People on Camera. Folks in my classes will get special DISCOUNT passes during NAB Show! Then I’ll head back to North Hall to moderate a panel on Breaking Into the Industry with Christine Steele, Katrina Deleon of Production HUB, Ashley Kennedy of Lynda, Paul Murphy and DP Joseph DiBlasi. Boy will that be an interesting conversation!  If I haven’t lost my voice yet, then I’ll see you over at Supermeet or maybe the Killer Tracks party.

Wednesday, April 20th

My day starts with being a guest on NAB Show Live! with host Janet West tackling gender balance and #womeninfilm with some terrific colleagues I’m looking forward to meeting. Then, hmmm, should I head over to the show floor or take some chill time at the pool? Perhaps a bit of both. I’ll catch up with some Lynda.com friends and colleagues Wednesday for cocktails, then I’ll be headed to dinner. (Any great ideas? I do promise to repost my off-strip Vegas restaurant favs blog post, but always looking for more out of the mainstream rec’s.) I don’t head out until late morning Thursday, so it could be a late night!

I look forward to connecting with you in Las Vegas or at another content event this year!

 

Amy DeLouise is a Director/Producer/Author and Speaker at NAB Show among other industry events. Her new book The Producer’s Playbook: Real People on Camera is out tjhis week from Focal Press.

 

 

GendergapTweetI’m not a hand-wringer. Neither are most women in TV/film/media production. We’re do-ers. That’s how we got into this business in the first place. At NABShow, the annual conference of the broadcast and media production industry that draws 100,000 to Vegas (and about 85,000 of the attendees are men), I was privileged to moderate a panel on the subject of closing the gender gap in production. The panel included Ellen Wixted, Adobe; Siân Fever, Editor (UK) and GBFTE Governor; Megan McGough Christian, WGBH; and Kylee Wall, Editor and blogger on Creative Cow –who pushed to have the panel be part of the event.  You can watch the whole discussion here:

Special thanks to Creative Cow, Adobe and FMC, who supported and publicized this effort, and helped to make it a priority in an industry event known for, well, a lot of “Vegas booth babes.” Prior to the event, we pulled together some dismal statistics across the industry. But we also talked about solutions. I was thrilled by the number of men in the packed room, the number of millennials ready to tackle this challenge, and the interesting and continued commentary online afterwards (primarily on Twitter—see #postgendergap).  Please pass the link along and share your solutions using the #postgendergap hashtag.

Here are some of the simple ideas we proposed, plus a few more I’ve thought of since:

  1. Take Names Off Resumes. All of us have bias, and it’s not just gender-related. So give yourself and your company the advantage of finding the best person for the job by removing bias in the hiring process. There’s all kinds of data to back this up, by the way. A University of Melbourne study  showed that people with “simple” names were promoted more easily. In other words, people with less ethnic-sounding names. A University of Ohio study showed that women with more feminine sounding names had less career success in traditionally male jobs. And a Wharton study using mock email addresses with 6,500 professors at 259 top US universities found them more likely to meet with and mentor students with white male names.
  2. Promote Young Women for Potential. A 2011 McKinsey report—famously quoted by Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In–showed that men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on performance.  This means young women get shut out of the tech leadership pipeline more quickly than their male counterparts. We know that is true, because the statistics on gender in film schools is about even. Yet 10 years out, women only hold 17% of the industry jobs. We also know from the recent Women in Film/Sundance study that men and women win awards at film festivals at an equal rate, yet men are offered their first major directing gig by big studios afterwards, and women are not. In other words, men are snapped up for their directing potential. You can change that, by seeing the potential in a young woman behind the camera, or in another “technical” job, and help her climb that ladder. Oh, and if you are posting a job for Director of Photography, please ask for a DoP and not a “cameraman.”
  3. Promote Experienced Men and Women Based on Performance not Style. Once we get into the higher ranks of leadership, the tables turn. The very leadership qualities that make someone effective—being bold, being assertive—are often held against women. Women need to be more choosy about when they are assertive, or they will be perceived as not team players at best, b*tches, or worse.  As an employer you can change this by promoting women and men for the job they accomplish. Period. On the flip side, if you are a woman, you’re going to need to be more assertive about asking for more pay. But somehow do it in a way that isn’t b*tchy Hmm. This strikes me as forcing women into some kind of no-win situation regarding what kind of “style” they will present in the workplace. So how about promoting based on performance?
  4. Hand Out Clean-Up Jobs Equally. Invite Women to the Party. Study after study has shown that women tend to be asked to get coffee and clean up after meetings, no matter what their role. It’s easy to change this. Post a sign in the office kitchen: “This week’s kitchen boss is…Bob” and rotate among all your employees equally.  The flip side of this coin is making sure women int he office are invited to after-hours happy hours and meetups the same way men are. Only then can they be seen as colleagues and friends, and develop personal relationships with mentors.
  5. Put Women on Stage. At conference after conference that I attend in the tech and media industries, there is just one token woman on the stage as a speaker. Surely we can find more women for these high visibility posts? Conference planners, look for women to speak. And reach out to groups like Innovation Women, which offers a women-in-tech speakers bureau. We’re out here. So the onus is on you to change the balance on stage at your next event.

Amy DeLouise is a multi-media director, producer, speaker and author in the media/content industry. She’s happy to bring everyone coffee on the set, as long as someone invites her to the happy hour after the shoot.