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entertainment made for children and families. We have achieved that. In fact, we have achieved one of our goals, which was to get more female lead characters in children’s and family television programming and movies. Just last year we did reach that milestone of being 50/50 in male female in both of those medias so yeah, we are very thrilled about that. We have other goals but that is a big change because the first study we did way back in the beginning female characters where…. Female leads were 11 percent at that time and now it is 50 percent. AK: You told me you were raised to be extremely polite, but yet there is an interesting dichotomy there. You were raised with what I call “the disease of politeness” that girls in my generation and your generation, we were kind of infused with it. But at the same time you were also raised by your father who was quite inclusive with a lot of things that were traditionally male. In what ways are you raising your daughter similarly to how you were raised, and in what ways you are raising her differently from how you were raised? GD: Well, it’s all been quite different. She was just born the way she is, which is very self-confident and poised. I tell her, “I will never be as poised as you are.” I wanted to be her popular culture literacy educator. That is why I started the whole institute, was because I realized when I first saw that first television program I thought, “Oh no. Kids are being raised from minute one to accept that men and boys are more important than woman and girls. I can’t prevent her from growing up knowing that woman are thought of as second class citizens, but I’ll do everything I can to change that for her.” With her and with my boys, I did the same thing. I always watched with them. whatever my boys were watching, like you did with your son, I could say, “Did you know that there is only one girl in that whole movie? Did you notice that?” Or, “Do you think girls can do what those boys are doing?” Or, “Why do you think she is wearing that if she is going to go rescue somebody? Don’t you think that’s strange?” They became very savvy. Then they started noticing things before I did. So that was great. AK: What is really cool is that they were actually interested in the questions you were asking and receptive to it. I would imagine that you raised your boys to be very conscious young men in terms of how to treat a woman and how to view women. Can you tell me a little about that? GD: It’s not just for women that we need to show more women on screen. My goal is to have fictitious worlds reflect reality, which is ½ female and incredibly diverse; which is 40 percent people of color, 20 percent with different abilities. Forty percent are heavy body types, and the representation of people with different gender identities and all of that, it barely registers. AK: What is so interesting is that society kind of goes in a loop, right? You’ve got reality, then you have art, then you have people looking at art and then incorporating that into their reality. It’s like a circle. Think about how many people are influenced by television, film, music, and then that influences how they show up in our culture, which then shapes our “reality.” GD: Oh, absolutely. You think these are just harmless pieces of entertainment, but they cause tremendous change that we have measured. FOX asked us to do a study on the Dana Scully character from X-Files to find out what impact she had on women going into STEM careers. We found that 58 percent of woman who are currently in STEM jobs named that character, specifically, as their inspiration to go into a STEM career. That’s just one character on one TV show. It’s really incredible. AK: Mind blowing. GD: In 2012, girls’ participation in archery shot up 100 percent and it was because Brave and The Hunger Games both came out in the summer of 2012, and girls left the theater and bought a bow. AK: Let’s talk about the recent study, Women Over 50, The Right to Be Seen on Screen. Can you tell me a little bit about that study and how that is being presented to the entertainment industry, and