Where do the female filmmakers go? Feat. Gregory Goodale (Professor, Advocate, Post-Humanist)

Fear(ful)less: Filmmaking from the Edge

Following Naomi’s TEDxTalk, Northeastern University professor Greg Goodale reached out and offered to dedicate his Spring “Advocacy Writing” class to helping Naomi with whatever research/writing she needed in support of her women in film revolution.

The class was assigned two research papers. In this week’s episode, Greg comes on the show to talk with Naomi about the results of one of these research projects. Two teams of students wrote two papers on this topic: If women are graduating from film school at 50% and are only directing 18% of all micro-budget feature films, where are they going?? What is happening to these women that the majority of them are never even making their first feature film? The students were asked to conduct interviews among female filmmakers in this specific position and draw conclusions as to what is going wrong and how it might be addressed. Greg and Naomi discuss the students’ findings.

They reference two research papers written by these students: “Where Do All the Women Go? A Qualitative Analysis On the Absence of Females in Filmmaking” by Casey Matsumoto, Ellie Ballin, Leah Soboroff, Leah Gold and “Female Filmmakers Research Paper” by Maggie Soper, Hallie O’Conor, Kiki Yi, Ellen Sciales.

(NOTE: This week’s episode was also supposed to include an interview with Elif Mamak about the second research topic taken on by the class, but in a catastrophic technology failure, the interview Naomi recorded with her was erased. They are going to re-do that interview and it will be released as a separate mini-pode next week.)

My Favorite Thing This Week: Harvard Business Review article: We Recorded VCs Conversations and Analyzed How They Talk Differently About Female Entrepreneurs. Hardly surprising, but deeply illuminating.

As always, the work of this podcast is for Naomi to help you and herself crack the nut of how to have a life as an artist and entrepreneur, so if you have stories to share from your own life – successes, failures, times you learned something – or if you have a question you would like Naomi to answer or find the answer to or a person you would like her to interview – send them all her way. Write or send a voice memo to [e-mail]

https://fearfulless.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/fearfulless-episode-19-5-25-17.mp3