Gloria Steinem Quotes

Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but it's through the back door.

For me, I want to see diversity in storytelling sources because we live in a very diverse society, and the stories are for the whole society. That's really important. For me, as a female filmmaker, when I was out on the festival circuit on 2006, I felt like such a freaking anomaly - an oddity.

I can't live in a world where there are only, like, four kinds of women. Or where every woman is obsessed with cake. The very least I ask is that we have one female character in the world who likes savory things! I don't have any role models who like cheese!

I think as soon as you're a woman, or any minority doing something, you automatically become a representative for it, and I think a lot of brilliant women's interviews are being wasted on talking about what it's like being a woman.

The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color. Nope. Not good enough.

Every year there's five cop shows, five medical shows and five 'Law & Orders,' but when it's a show about women, they want to pit everyone against each other. I don't think they'd do that if it was a guy show. I think there's room for all of us.

No matter what happens, we couldn't let people say Asian-American actors can't act.

The number of Latino roles is very limited, and it's unfortunate there isn't more color-blind casting.

I was very proud, on just my second day in office, to appoint a gender-balanced cabinet - one of only three in the developed world.

When I first started, all the media I ever got was, 'Hey! There's this Indian girl. And even though she is Indian, she gets views and stuff.'

Why can't a seven-foot guy play a doctor? Why can't I be a teacher? Why can't I be a football coach? Why can't I be a cab driver? Anything. Anything else than that. I can cry. I can do those things that they think the big guys can't do. So just give us a chance.

Of course we've been fighting against stereotypes from Day One at East West. That's the reason we formed: to combat that, and to show we are capable of more than just fulfilling the stereotypes - waiter, laundryman, gardener, martial artist, villain.

I think most people write from what they see in their own world, which is maybe why we so often see an African-American woman as the best friend, or the one you bring in when you need some sass. It's like we're put in a box.

You just wish sometimes that people would treat you like a human being rather than seeing your gender first and who you are second.

I want to see 10 female rappers getting regular rotation. It can't be all about a man's opinion.

'Black film,' that term allows studios to just marginalize a movie and say, 'We've made our black film. We've made our film with people of color in it,' as opposed to, 'I just feel like people of color should be in every genre.'

Females want other females to be really strong, so there are a whole lot of scripts that are basically just male parts renamed as a girl.

African-Americans are always forced to learn the other culture, but the other culture is not forced to learn ours. I went to acting school at Juilliard, and we learned Shakespeare and Shaw, but we never did the work of a single African-American playwright, not August Wilson or Ntozake Shange or Imir Baraka.

There are so few representations of women that look remotely real in scripted television.

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?'

Stronger than all the armies is the idea whose time has come. The time has come for equality in sharing in government and education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here.

You cannot collectively, as a society, decide that you are only going to represent one part of a minority. It's like saying you've represented black people on television because you aired an episode of the 'Cosbys.'

I think women benefit from being in places and having positions where the quality of work is the criteria, not what you look like. Not every place is like that.