The year is finally coming to a close so it’s time for us to take a look back and highlight a few notable men who we feel have, in some way, supported women, gender parity, and the disruption of archaic gender norms. It’s been a groundbreaking year for women which hopefully signals future progress for our society, but if we truly want to shift our culture to a more gender equal standard, there needs to be more men like the ones below that are stepping up.
Terry Crews
Crews is known for many different things: he’s a former football player, a star on the hilarious Brooklyn Nine-Nine, as well as a painter and illustrator (you should definitely check out his very “Bob Ross-like” holiday segment). But since the #MeToo movement, Crews has become a “Silence Breaker” for coming forward about being sexually assaulted by a Hollywood executive and testified in June before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the topic of sexual assault. He emphasized his solidarity with sexual assault survivors and how outdated societal expectations of men scare male victims from coming forward about their trauma.
Men:
Stop talking so much in meetings.
Make space for women to speak.
If you see other men doing this, interrupt them and call them out.
I’m guilty of mansplaining in the past and I’m actively working on changing my behavior.
— Ryan Carson (he/him) (@ryancarson) November 6, 2018
Ryan Carson
Carson is the CEO and founder of Treehouse, an online school that offers “affordable technology education” as well as helps companies develop diverse teams. This year, Treehouse announced their apprenticeship program, “TalentPath,” which is “a scalable system for creating and retaining diverse talent” for companies. Not only does it seem like a lot of work was put into making the program a reality, but it also seems that a truly empathetic approach was taken by Carson and his team to find a substantial solution to the tech industry’s diversity problem.
Pat Gelsinger
For Gelsinger, closing the gender gap is beneficial to society and to business. This past year, his cloud infrastructure and information technology company VMware donated $15 million to Stanford University for the launch of VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. The lab is a “research and collaboration initiative that seeks to permanently close the gender divide in the workplace” and will be helmed by Shelley Corell, a Stanford sociology professor. Aside from gender representation, VMware seeks to close the wage gap and they seem quite close. According to the company, “women earn 99% of their male counterparts’ salary globally and racial and ethnic minority employees earn 100% of their white counterparts in the U.S.”
Perhaps she didn’t report it because women who come forward with sexual abuse allegations are routinely blamed, minimized and doubted, just as you are doing right now. pic.twitter.com/BQ6PECw3h8
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) September 21, 2018
Kumail Nanjiani
Since the release of actor-comedian Nanijani’s semi-autographical film The Big Sick in 2017, the rom-com movie co-written by his wife, Emily V. Gordon, picked up numerous award nominations, including an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Since then, Nanijani has remained extremely vocal about numerous social issues taking place in America and continually uses his trademark sarcastic humor to underline the ridiculousness of prejudice and scandals in the modern day. However, when it comes to discussing female representation and sexism, Nanijani is thoughtful and reflective of the hardships found in the female experience as shown in his videos with MAKERS, the feminist media brand.