Shonda Rhimes Quotes

As somebody who has been an executive producer on a television series, I can tell you that increasing director diversity is as simple as hiring more women and more people of color.

I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates - even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process.

If you're choosing somebody that doesn't have the competence, but because it's a young guy, or it's a lady or if it's a man, it's a positive discrimination and I won't push that.

When it comes to meritocracy and diversity, the symbolic is real. And that means that simple actions that reduce bias, such as blind resume or application screening, are a double win: they reduce implicit bias and they help communicate our commitment to meritocracy.

It's time for male leaders to not only ask for binders of qualified women, but to re-write the definition of 'qualified.' The best man for the job, may in fact, be a woman, whose biography is not traditional, but is rich with experiences and skills that are not necessarily learned either in school or on the job.

Action roles - or any role - should go to the best guy for the job. People obsess about nationality. Hollywood and America might be the hub for pop culture and cinema for the Western world, but that shouldn't suggest that all the roles should go to young American men.

The Australian way of affirmative action is setting goals and recognising discrimination and lack of opportunity and deciding to take action and setting some goals and targets. I guess I prefer that language to talking about quotas.

We've heard the excuses from those responsible for hiring that they don't want to take a chance on a new director. But the truth is that the industry hires new directors all the time; it's just that most of them are white males.

Sometimes it's not even a role that's specifically written for a woman. It could be a role written for a white man or Asian man, or Latino. If it's something that I feel I could do well, I go after it. Especially if it's nothing that has to be gender or race specific, I'm all over it.

If you look at your companies, and half of your staff are not female, and a decent percentage of them are not people of color, then you are part of the problem because you need people working for you and you need people in positions of leadership who can exercise their bias and who can exercise their perspective.

If interviewers are prejudiced against women or Hispanics, for example, a face-to-face interview will predictably result in discrimination. Reliance on tests, or on actual or past performance, can promote equality.

If I only care about equality for transgender people, then I am leaving so many people behind - if I'm not at the same time seeking to end discrimination against people of color, seeking to end discrimination against women, seeking to ensure that people of every religious background have an equal opportunity.

If we want little girls and young women and people of color to see they have a place in the tech world, it's up to us to make that place for them.

I've been working almost 20 years, and I think I've worked with maybe one black director of photography in that time. Maybe two women directors or DPs. Maybe. And I've done a lot of TV. That's a lot of people I've worked with.

When you surround yourself with white people, you continue to hire white people, and when you make an effort to hire people of color, that does bring in different stories and different people.

There's this perception that there's a pipeline problem for women and people of color. I don't buy into that. I think we have a broken doorbell problem, and there are plenty of women and people of color standing at the doorstep trying to get in the door, and nobody's opening it.

The problem in business isn't that women are overlooked because they are women, it's that most people subconsciously look to employ a mini-me. It's not a gender issue, it's about diversification full stop. It's hard to change that mindset and it hits women particularly hard because men historically have always been the recruiters.

Unfortunately, oftentimes people hire and give opportunities to people that look like them. They don't realize how much their own internal lives or privilege gets in the way of looking for people outside of the traditional spaces where they always find people.

You are a much more forceful advocate against gender bias and wage inequality if you actually hire women. If you are a white man who advocates for change, then hire someone other than a white man as an example of that change.

I want white men to look around in their office and say, 'Oh, look, there's a lot of white men here. Let's change this.'

When I joined Google, it was 1,000 people. It took me two and a half years to look around and realize there weren't a lot of people like me.

I believe a person regardless of race should get the job.

We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.

If you recall when [John] Kennedy passed an edict, 'Every person you hire in the Post Office must be African American,' the challenge with that is if all of a sudden, you are hired just because of the color of your skin, ability has nothing to do with it.And if ability has nothing to do with it, what does it do? It promotes mediocrity.

Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women.