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In the new Shatterbox Anthology film "50/50," Emmy-nominated filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain embarks on the true history of powerful women around the world.
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00:00I recently learned this fact that completely blew my mind.
00:03I'm at this event and I meet a woman named Laura Listwood and we're talking and I'm like,
00:07what do you do?
00:08And she said, I convene elected women presidents and prime ministers for the United Nations.
00:12And I was like, wow, that's an amazing thing to do.
00:15How long have you been doing that?
00:16She said, oh, around 20 years.
00:18And I was like, hmm, how many had there been 20 years ago?
00:22And she said, 15.
00:24So I was like, well, how many are there today?
00:27And she said, oh, around 50.
00:30And I was like, 50?
00:33How did I not know that, that there had been around 50 elected women presidents and prime
00:39ministers?
00:40And that made me think, gosh, maybe we've been just telling the story of scarcity for
00:45so long and maybe it's time we told a news story of abundance.
01:05I woke up the next morning and I couldn't wait to tell Ken and our daughters about how
01:09many women had been elected heads of state.
01:12And then I proceeded to ask everyone around me who I thought might know the number and nobody
01:16even came close to half.
01:18I asked friends, I asked CEOs of big companies, feminists, people on the street.
01:23How many elected women presidents and prime ministers in the whole world do you think
01:26there have been?
01:27Elected, no royalty.
01:29So three.
01:30Not many.
01:31Five.
01:31Six.
01:32Ten.
01:32I would say under five.
01:34I don't know.
01:35So many.
01:35The answer is 50.
01:3750?
01:38Really?
01:3850.
01:39Oh, wow.
01:4150.
01:42Oh, good.
01:43But not enough.
01:46I mean, I've always thought of myself as a feminist.
01:49My great grandmother marched, my mother marched, I've marched.
01:53Even when I was growing up, my mom was writing her PhD thesis on the importance of mentors
01:58and mothers on successful women.
02:01And my dad wrote books about women in power.
02:04So I was completely disappointed in myself for not knowing.
02:07And it made me think, what else don't I know?
02:09And this all set me down a road to piece together a new narrative that looks at, where are we
02:16really on the greater arc of history of women in power?
02:19And what's it going to take to get to a 50-50 world?
02:23And I'm not talking just politics and boardrooms.
02:26I am talking across all parts of society, truly shifting the gender balance to be better
02:31for everyone.
02:33So in order to think about where we are on this arc, and how we're going to get to where
02:37we want to go, let's go back to the very beginning.
02:42It turns out the oldest hominid ever discovered is a female hominid.
02:46Not a feminist, but a feminid.
02:49Okay, we actually know very little about who wore the pants back then.
02:53Not that pants even existed.
02:55But fast forward to the Neolithic age, things were pretty egalitarian.
03:00Women and men had equal social status, and the earliest written laws reflected these
03:05egalitarian societies.
03:07Women could choose to marry and divorce.
03:10Women were healers, shamans, religious leaders, warriors, and lawmakers.
03:15All genders were respected.
03:18We're talking over 10,000 years ago this was happening.
03:22And then, like many times on our journey, the story takes a dark turn.
03:28The balance shifted.
03:30My father attributed this shift to literacy rewiring our brains.
03:34Others point to the rise of agriculture, which favored physical strength, the conquest of land.
03:40We started seeing the development of military, political power.
03:46Even art became more dude-centric.
03:49Goddesses became gods, and the voices of women were silenced.
03:54In ancient Mesopotamia, one of the earliest laws stated,
03:57If a woman speaks to a man out of turn, her teeth will be smashed in by a burnt brick.
04:05Patriarchy had arrived and was literally chiseled in stone.
04:10But we know that our history has been written mostly by men.
04:13I want the rest of the story.
04:15How are we supposed to know where we are in the arc of history if we don't have the full
04:19context?
04:20And not just elected leaders, but the centuries of badass women that I know were there, paving
04:26the paths and contributing to where we are today.
04:30Let's go find them.
04:34Here we have Hatshepsut in ancient Egypt, one of the first great women leaders.
04:40Egypt thrived under her long and influential reign for 22 years.
04:45But the next pharaoh literally chiseled her face out of history.
04:49And here's Boudicca, the woman warrior who led the Britons in a revolt against the Romans.
04:53And Wuzetian, the first and only female ruler of China, who also had her story altered by
05:00the men who followed.
05:01There was Margaret I of Denmark who united the Scandinavian nations.
05:07I had never seen all these women linked together.
05:10Like warrior queen Amina who ruled what is now Nigeria.
05:15And Queen Elizabeth I, at the time the most powerful person in the world, ruled for nearly
05:2050 years.
05:22While she was in power, an explorer brought her what he thought was the horn from a unicorn.
05:26She liked it so much she added it to the crown jewels.
05:29We could actually call her a unicorn.
05:32We could call all of these women unicorns.
05:35Not mythical or unreal, but women who stood out, unique to their day.
05:40Courageous women navigating uncharted terrain.
05:44And as I learned more about these women, I kept thinking about my mom's thesis that looked
05:49at successful women and the importance of their female mentors.
05:52So mom, how would you define a mentor?
05:56Someone who helps somebody else find their own path.
06:01One question you haven't asked me, which is important, is why did I study mentors?
06:07I never had a mentor.
06:09And then I thought, I wonder what it's like if someone had a mentor.
06:14All the studies, and I had to read all the studies about men first.
06:19Having a mentor made the difference in the final push towards success.
06:28I mean, how did my mom accomplish so much without a mentor?
06:32And how did these women centuries ago accomplish so much?
06:35Did they have mentors?
06:36How did it even work back then?
06:39There was no easy way to connect with other women leaders.
06:41Hello.
06:42Hello.
06:44Hello.
06:44And no narrative over time to link their stories together.
06:48But eventually that narrative did begin.
06:51Like with Christine de Pazan in France in the 1300s.
06:55500 years before the word feminism was even coined, she is considered the first writer to
07:01examine the roles of women throughout history and to weave together their experiences.
07:06Creating a narrative, not just of political leaders, but of women in all different ways
07:11we contribute to society.
07:13And over the centuries, countless women would build on that narrative.
07:17As artists, storytellers, philosophers, mothers, and leaders.
07:24But the mountains of imbalance were also centuries high.
07:28And for everyone climbed, there was another to struggle with.
07:30Room for fewer and fewer at the top, with more struggling to climb, more hurdles, more
07:35pushback.
07:36Like it was around this time that many of the wise, independent, and rebellious women of
07:41their day were labeled witches and put on trial.
07:45An estimated 50,000 women in Europe and the U.S. were burned and executed.
07:52That's a lot of powerful women to lose from our narrative.
07:56And the imbalance was also becoming more and more embedded in political structures.
08:01Even our own country, which I do love, was established with the line, all men are created
08:08equal.
08:10And this was a time of slavery.
08:12Clearly they didn't mean all men.
08:14And clearly they didn't mean women.
08:17Women couldn't own property.
08:19We had the same legal status as children.
08:21We couldn't vote.
08:24But no mountain was going to truly hold our power back.
08:30Women were rising in art, science, and culture.
08:36And pioneers were gathering, coming together to fight for more rights.
08:41Momentum was building in Europe, the U.S., and dots around the globe into what we now call
08:46the first wave of feminism.
08:48In 1848, 300 women and a few men convened in Seneca Falls, New York and declared, all men
08:55and women are created equal.
08:59The whole suffragist fight was gruesome.
09:02But the battle was worth it.
09:05Seventy years after Seneca Falls, women in the U.S. won the right to vote.
09:11But I found this part so haunting.
09:13Only one of the women who attended Seneca Falls was still alive.
09:18Charlotte Woodward was 92 and she didn't make it to the polls.
09:22She got sick on election day.
09:26And this story was such a reminder for me on how long real social change takes.
09:32And that we can't take any of these hard-fought rights for granted.
09:38And if we want to be alive to experience a more equal world, we have to accelerate the
09:45pace of change.
09:47And I do think that's happening.
09:50I mean, if we look at the whole arc of history, a lot has happened in the last hundred years.
09:56Even just in my lifetime.
09:59I was born in 1970.
10:01The heart of the women's movement.
10:03I am a woman, here we go.
10:07It was an amazing surge of momentum.
10:10The second wave of feminism.
10:13Which like all change, had all kinds of challenges.
10:17The national chairman of the movement to stop the so-called Equal Rights Amendment is
10:22Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly.
10:25Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly.
10:26That Equal Rights Amendment, by the way, the ERA, was first introduced in Congress in
10:301923.
10:32Was brought back in the 70s and every year after.
10:35And it still hasn't passed a hundred years later.
10:40But what I didn't fully grasp about the momentum in the 70s is that while all the strides and
10:45struggles were happening in the US, women gathering, creating support groups, fighting for more
10:50rights, there was also a lot of exciting things happening on an international scale.
10:55By 1970, three countries had elected women as heads of state.
11:00And in 1975, the UN brought together the first international women's conference.
11:05Over 6,000 delegates from 133 countries traveled to Mexico City and gathered in person for two
11:11weeks to discuss the status of equal rights on a global scale.
11:18They made a collective plan.
11:20They'd convene again in Copenhagen in 1980.
11:23Above all, we have learned that to achieve full justice and equality for women will require
11:29a long and patient struggle.
11:32And they'd meet again in Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing in 95.
11:37Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights once and for all.
11:46It's like all these decades of global gatherings, where all the first and only is the unicorns
11:52from all over the world coming together to build networks of support.
11:56Kind of perfect that a herd of unicorns is called a blessing.
12:01It was also in the mid-90s that Laura Liswood started the Council of Women Leaders.
12:07I was noticing some very common themes running through about power, about how women are treated.
12:13I started asking them if they wanted to meet.
12:15They said they did.
12:17And so that's how the council started.
12:19And picture, this was the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
12:22All the connecting was done with faxes, letters, and plane rides just to have conversations.
12:29It's a whole different world today.
12:31The internet is accelerating the pace of change in so many ways.
12:35We can connect across continents and write and share stories that aren't already there,
12:40which brings power and opportunity to far more voices.
12:44But along with that comes greater responsibility.
12:50Our work is not done.
12:53Violence against women is global and systematic.
12:56Inequality is still present throughout every facet of our lives.
13:23In addition to that transparency and responsibility, today's world also gives us more ways to learn from each other.
13:29Person to person and country to country.
13:31I understand one of the priorities for you was to have a cabinet that was gender balanced.
13:36Why was that so important to you?
13:38Because it's 2015.
13:45There are over 300 studies showing that making those changes from all levels, business, politics, and culture,
13:52makes life better for everyone, not just women, everyone.
13:57Over half of the countries that rank highest in gender equality across different sectors also rank highest on the Global
14:04Happiness Index.
14:05A lot of these countries pay for early childcare and high-quality education.
14:10They have national parental leave for both men and women.
14:13So instead of this idea of stay-at-home mom, they're supporting parents, period.
14:18Because dads are being deprived of their power too.
14:22The power of nurturing and raising the next generation.
14:27A recent study in the U.S. showed that 50% of men who are offered paid paternity leave feel
14:32they can't take it.
14:36Men have an entire history of stereotypes and expectations to wrestle with too.
14:42And those men who are equal parents, I feel like they're the next chapter of first and only's that are
14:48paving the path to something better.
14:5150-50 isn't just about women getting more power, it's about everyone getting more power.
14:57It's about opening up the whole idea of what power is.
15:00Moving beyond the binaries of men and women, we're all on a continuum with different combinations of strengths to bring
15:08to the table.
15:10Power is leadership, but power is also love.
15:13Power is empathy.
15:16Power is the opportunity to find your own path.
15:20So how do we really get there to the world we want to see.
15:45I turned to the person who blew my mind and set me down this path in the first place.
15:50So Laura, how do we get to 50-50?
15:54Well, I think change itself goes from the unthinkable to the impossible to the inevitable.
16:00But someone has to move it along.
16:03I often like it to a standing ovation.
16:06A few people jump up and say, this is the best thing that they have ever seen.
16:11Then another larger group gets up and says, yes, yes, this was just excellent.
16:16Then the large group gets up and says, yeah, yeah, this was okay.
16:20And then finally the last group gets up because they can't see the stage.
16:55And Ken and I talked so much about what we were each going to say to her at this big
16:58rite of passage.
16:59My favorite saying in the Talmud is, when you teach your children, you teach your children's children.
17:05A mentor is someone who helps somebody else find their own path.
17:10These are all the people who are going to be there for the rest of your life supporting you.
17:15Each of these people has a whole room of people that supported them to allow them to be in this
17:21room supporting you.
17:24Piecing together this history and putting it into context made me see mentorship in a whole new way.
17:31Mentors are all around us, younger, older, peer to peer, country to country, and from all of history.
17:40And we need to keep them all right here, right next to us.
17:44I used to think I had the full context of women in power, but I was still letting the story
17:49of scarcity guide me.
17:52And then I realized that if we really build on the centuries of momentum, generations of courageous women that have
17:59brought us this far,
18:00we can take this story of scarcity and turn it into a story of abundance.
18:10When you get to the top of the mountain, pull the next one up.
18:16Then there'll be two of you, tired and proud.
18:21And when the second one has finished taking in the view, let her pull the next one up.
18:33Room enough for all on the mountain peaks to pull the next woman up.
18:42Pull the next man up.
18:46Pull the next up.
18:47Ah.
18:50Ah.
18:51Ah.
18:52Ah.
18:52Good.
18:53Bye.
19:36Ah.
19:41Ah.
19:45Ah.
19:47Ah.
19:55We're coming
20:16We're coming
20:27We're coming