Valerie Plame Quotes

Sexism kind of predisposes us to see men's work as more important than women's, and it is a problem, I guess, as writers, we have to change.

Being a woman in a male-dominated industry, you are so afraid of people thinking you are weak.

Gender injustice is a social impairment and therefore has to be corrected in social attitudes and behaviour.

I get the feeling that characters are written female when they have to be, and all the other characters are male, and it doesn't occur to somebody that the lawyer, the best friend, the landlord, whoever, can be female.

I'm saying the excessive focus on what gender a person is, rather than what they do, does a disservice to women.

I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.

Washington and Congress are steeped in history and tradition, and that's been very male-oriented.

In my career I have never felt that my being a woman was an obstacle or an advantage. I guess I've been oblivious.

People put stock in someone being in a 'girl group,' but we don't say that a band is a 'man group.'

In this society, if a man is called a woman, that's the biggest insult he could get. Is that because women are considered something less?

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

As an agent, I functioned like a guy. But the fact that I was a woman affected everything.

As long as male behavior is taken to be the norm, there can be no serious questioning of male traits and behavior. A norm is by definition a standard for judging; it is not itself subject to judgment.

There are some professions that culturally and sociologically take a long time to change, and because of that, there's still sexism in comedy audiences. We shouldn't blame them: I do it too. A woman comes on, and I feel slightly anxious. I'm a woman in comedy, and I do that; I think everyone does.

Especially with girls, people always want to put them in little brackets.

We call our little girls bossy. Go to a playground; little girls get called bossy all the time - a word that's almost never used for boys - and that leads directly to the problems women face in the workforce.

Books written by boys are given very different treatment to those written by girls: they're even given very different covers. People also expect, in this YA-booming world, girls to be less experimental than boys: girls are achieving a lot of success, but they're confined.

Obviously I've spent most of my working life with men and they have this way of operating which seems a bit alien to me.

I have never been good at doing impressions of women. Which is understandable. There's a gender issue.

Once in a while, I still witness occasionally sexist behavior and comments from men (which experience has taught me you should always deflect with humour rather than anger). Old habits die hard, after all, and it's unrealistic to expect dinosaurs to fall silent overnight.

I would not say that female cosmonauts are not welcomed in the Russian space program. I must say, however, that all spaceflight hardware, including spacesuits and spacecraft comfort assuring systems, were designed mostly by men and for men.

True gender equality in Scotland - and elsewhere - is still some way off.

If being a woman is a factor politically, it's usually not because of a conscious bias, but because women are a novelty.

Over the years, the most ponderous problem for women has been that men think that men and women are very different. Another of our massive problems is that women also think that men and women are very different.