Quotes About Gender

We teenage girls are faced with a quandary: we know what we want but are forced to wait for our male counterparts to grow up. We are ready for intense and meaningful relationships, but research indicates that males will not reach maturity until their mid-20s.

In football, you're dealing with grown men. In gymnastics, you're dealing with prepubescent teenage girls. There's a huge difference. At that age, you're not confident enough to have a voice.

Teenage girls in television and film, in my experience, oftentimes are portrayed as either the sweet, innocent virgin or the super-sexy, experienced, town bicycle. There never seems to be an in-between. I think most girls are somewhere in between those two tropes.

I'd refer to myself as a feminist. I don't think my music is overtly rooted in feminism. I'm a teenager, and 95 percent of my friends are boys, and that's just the way I've always been.

It sounds so negative of me to say, but I don't feel like there were many coming-of-age films when I was growing up. I think that when I was a teenager, I felt really misrepresented in the teenage roles that I was watching onscreen. Especially in women.

As a teenager, I played men in my first two plays.

Like many teens, I struggled with my body and looks, but my despair was amplified by the expectations of cisnormativity and the gender binary as well as the impossibly high beauty standards that I, and my female peers, measured myself against.

My personal style really started in my teens when I gained purchasing power to actually buy my own damn clothes. For so long, my parents dictated what I wore, which largely was their way of containing me within the gender binary.

Can you, in a million years, imagine another female senator - Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Claire McCaskill - reacting to being called 'ma'am' like Barbara Boxer did? This is the kind of sanctimonious self-absorption on the modern left that makes my teeth itch.

It's nice to get my teeth into something that isn't a stereotypical female role.

Telephone operators have called me 'sir' since I was 6.

What I'm about to say won't be popular, but it's true: If being a television showrunner is the job you want, and you are a woman, I would not suggest you have children. The reality is that you just cannot do both well.

Whether you're writing television or movies, at some point you're going to encounter a male executive or investor who's going to say, 'I don't like that woman. She's unlikable.' And often, it's literally for being a regular human woman as opposed to an attracting human woman.

Television is a real woman's medium... but what's disturbing is, still even in television, women have so little to do with what's going on behind the scenes.

Of course I am aware that there is a level of sexism in any large institution, but I find, in television and film, most of the producers are women.

In 1967, my mother - then Francie Weinman - graduated from Northwestern University with a degree from the prestigious Medill School of Journalism. But because she is a woman, the only television news job she could get in her hometown of Chicago was as a secretary at a network affiliate.

I wasn't prepared for the environment I encountered trying to break into television news. In the world of music, where I spent my formative years, we were judged solely on our talent, and gender wasn't a factor.

I really don't know how women in television news do the job. It's a very male-oriented business.

I think figuring out how to do the best job you can, because frankly, no matter what gender you are - in television news - you're all measured by the same thing: which is the news you make or break, and the ratings you are able to deliver. But, how the audience hears you - or how the interviewer does - is also interesting.

You don't go out and change your gender for a television show, O.K.? It ain't happening. I don't care who you are.

Not so long ago, my feminist education taught me to ask the question, 'Is the gaze male?' The answer, apparently, is yes, which is why so many movies and television shows are about men and not women.

I learned little by little. I learned how to draw. I learned how to tell the difference in the quality of fabrics - the subtle differences. I started with collections for men. So my first collection for women was deeply inspired by male roles.

When it comes to having conversations with girls what I hear from them is that there is a lot of pressure to look a certain way, act a certain way, perform a certain way, and there are very mixed messages. We are telling them, 'Be yourself, be true to who you are,' but what does that mean in a society of comparison, competition, and individualism?

My problem starts when I see that in a situation when the girl is telling her feeling, say crying or laughing, the song is sung by a male singer. Why?