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This article uses Acker’s concept of inequality regimes to analyze qualitative research findings on work-life balance and gender equality for women in British television production. Female survey respondents, focus group participants, and interviewees spoke of their subjective experience of gendered work practices which disadvantage women as women. These findings build on existing research showing gender disadvantage in the industry, leading to loss of human capital and a narrowing of the range of creative experience. They also show that growing numbers of women are seeking alternative modes of production, at a time of increased awareness of inequality. Such alternatives suggest that change is possible, although it is strongly constrained by organizational logics and subject to continued resistance, in line with Acker’s framework of analysis. Visibility of inequalities is the key to supporting change.

Acting, especially in the screen arts industry, is a job where women are subjected to pronounced and widely accepted socio-cultural aesthetic ideals within an industry that has become renowned for its tolerance for and justifications of sexism and sexualized violence. However, there is a limited amount of scholarship that examines actors and acting from a work and employment perspective. Drawing on the literature on work insecurity and gender inequities in cultural work, this article examines the screen industry from the perspective of women actors in a semi-peripheral location in Canada. This is a cohort that has managed to remain in the industry, despite high levels of attrition. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews, our participants identify a range of strategies they employ (toughness, silence, humour, refusal, creative resistance) to respond to workplace sexism and gender-based constraints as they try to balance their creative agency with career sustainability. Participants emphasized that finding multiple outlets for realizing creative agency is crucial to counteracting everyday sexism and remaining in the industry.

Absent mechanisms of restorative justice, victims of sexual harassment, particularly those within the LGBT+ community that are already frequent targets of relational aggression, are unlikely to either report or reckon with the consequences of inappropriate workplace behaviors and discrimination. Written from the perspective of a masculinized bisexual whose encounter with a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and psychological abuse provoked suicidal ideation, this paper employs the artistic practices of illustration as a means of first re-cognizing and recognizing phenomena, a Ricœurean construct of narrative and a palimpsest of multivocal text and images to evoke the lived experience of harassment and an analytic layer to invoke the phenomenon. By drawing, writing, and thinking through the phenomenon, the marriage of artistic and phenomenological approaches allows both researcher and reader to confront the ‘painful truths’ that otherwise resist easy analysis.

Bystander intervention has shown promise in preventing sexual violence in certain social contexts. Despite emerging evidence of pervasive sexual violence at music festivals, no research has considered bystander intervention in this setting. Drawing on an online survey conducted with 371 Australian festival attendees, we explore the role of gender on bystander intervention at music festivals. Findings point to significant gender differences, with women more willing and likely to intervene in a broader range of scenarios. We argue that responses to sexual violence are a collective responsibility shared by both women and men, as well as festival organizers and industry bodies.

Sexual harassment continues to be a problem that most commonly affects women in the United States workforce today. While there are legal and organizational remedies available, most of these mechanisms for redress only exist for workers in traditional employeremployee contexts. Independent contractors, self-employed workers who represent a growing number of labor force participants in this economy, can therefore only use informal means of addressing sexual harassment. This study used grounded theory methods to analyze 88 separate narratives of sexual harassment from 70 fashion models, an overwhelmingly female set of independent contractors currently operating in the American economy. The aim of the analysis was to understand the mix and meaning behind the use of informal strategies—more specifically confrontation versus non-confrontation—in response to this sexual harassment. Notably, models most often confronted the perpetrators of harassment. Critically, however, those models who chose non-confrontation did not minimize the abuse that they faced. Instead, they either saw themselves as powerless or engaged in self-blame when faced with harassment on the job.

The esports, or competitive video gaming, industry is an exciting area of economic and cultural growth. Gaming can facilitate interpersonal connection, shared problem-solving, and creativity. Players may purchase a game, watch a streamer play it online, join an online gaming community, attend a tournament, compete professionally, or find employment in game development or a related field. The gaming industry generates enormous economic value and employs tens of thousands of people in the UK alone. However, the esports sector does not extend its benefits equally. Women are regularly verbally harassed in video games, countless women have been groped at esports events, women have been raped by professional players, underage fans have been groomed. Abuse is endemic to online gaming communities.

Phenomena of inappropriate behaviour and harassment are neither new nor unique to the cultural domain. However, these phenomena have not been largely publicly discussed before the 2017 me too movement, presumably due to the culture of silence prominent within the cultural domain. After the movement that started from the film industry and quickly spread around the world, discussion on ethical working conditions has arisen within all the cultural domain as well. This qualitative driven mixed methods research reviews the current situation of inappropriate behaviour and harassment in Finland and seeks to understand the magnitude and forms of the phenomena. The research questions are: 1) What special characteristics or structures in the arts and culture field enable inappropriate behaviour and harassment or the possibility of them? And 2) What can be done to eliminate inappropriate behaviour and harassment from arts and culture workplaces? The research questions are answered analyzing research data collected using a survey and six themed interviews. Research data was collected in the spring of 2021. Topics that surfaced from the survey were used as a basis for the interview questions. Findings from the survey and the interviews act as the thematical scope of this master’s thesis, as they are the most important themes to come out of this research. The main findings of the thesis are that there are four elements that enable and maintain the improper working culture within the cultural domain. The elements are insufficient funding, poor management, artist myth, and limitlessness of the work. These themes are examined in discussion with literature. The four steps this thesis suggests helping uproot the improper behaviour in the cultural domain according to the research data and literature are 1) Pushing for the cultural domain’s ethical board to be established, 2) Composing ethical guidelines for all the cultural domain, 3) Basing funding on following the said guidelines, and 4. Talking about improper behaviour publicly and bringing cases of misconduct forward.

A few pioneers have shown the way, but who will follow?

This article examines sexual and gendered harassment among professional female editorial photographers, whose experiences have largely been under-researched. It draws on semi-structured interviews conducted between 2017–2019 with 17 female professional editorial photographers, aged 23–82, who work in a variety of beats. Sixteen of 17 interviewees encountered sexual harassment, with gendered harassment the most common. Harassers included professors, other photographers, colleagues, salespeople, subjects, and the general public, whom photographers encountered at school, work, while networking, and when using and buying gear. Largely, participants addressed the sexual and gendered harassment on an individual level, rather than reporting it to editors or other authorities. These findings add qualitative nuance to quantitative research that suggests physical risks and economic precarity may drive women from the profession.

This article interrogates the localized experiences of present-day workers who identify as women in Australian postproduction sectors, including editing, visual effects (VFX), and animation, exploring sex­ ism and perceptions of change in the age of #MeToo. Considering the significant numbers of women working in these sectors, and the scant research into their experiences undertaken in an Australian context, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with ten women in various roles and in various geographical locations in Australia. This qualitative approach to data collection aims to explore inequalities that may not be captured in industry surveys, providing fine-grain details of the ways that individuals in postproduction experience sexism. The resulting data suggests that while there is continuity between the gendered experiences of these workers and that of women in industry sectors that have already been documen­ ted, there are, however, new observations about changes in work­ place behavior in the sector, brought about by growing public awareness of industry discrimination and harassment and of shifts in Australian industry policy. The authors isolated recurring themes within women’s gendered experiences in relation to how they per­ ceived the impact of the gender-equity initiatives on the attitudes of their co-workers, their workplace opportunities, and their experi­ ences as workers.

‘Postfeminist’ society has created the impression that contemporary discourses on gender representation, particularly in digital media platforms, are pointless. This misconception is coupled with online aggression by men’s rights activists who position feminist debates as sources of male oppression. However, media practices and consumption processes continue to maintain the supremacy of the male gender identity, which strengthens the process of transforming social media into a component of the “manosphere.” The failure of the fourth wave of feminism in utilising the Internet for mobilising activism for the ontological equality of all genders has succeeded by increasing gender-based violence against women. Indian women in comedy negotiate with these systemic inequalities while navigating male dominance in the comedy industry. The paper is an attempt to examine the structures of gender inequality and bias that affect the participation and advancement of women in the comedy circuit. Its focus remains on the formulation of a rape culture on social media and its subsequent consequences in the larger social context of the development of a patriarchal culture. 

On 5 October 2017, The New York Times published an article in which Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment by five women. The scandal grew to enormous proportions as more allegations against him followed. This led to the #MeToo and TIME'S UP movements, initiatives to fight sexual harassment in the workplace. Given that media discourse can have an impact on the knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours of the public regarding these phenomena (van Dijk 1989), this study adopts a Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) perspective and explores how power and gender inequality are sustained, (re)shaped and/or challenged by focusing on the reporting of the Harvey Weinstein case which - to the author's best knowledge - has not been analysed before in the field of linguistics. It draws from the systemic functional linguistics and the discourse-historical approach and it examines the way the perpetrator, the accusers and the phenomenon of sexual harassment were discursively constructed in five key articles published in the New York Times. The findings differ in a major way from existing research on sexual violence against women in that 1) the perpetrator, Weinstein, was depicted with clear ascription of agency, 2) women victims' voices and feelings were foregrounded, 3) the link between sexual harassment and the social context in which it occurs was discussed.

Women outnumber men in graduate and undergraduate programs in photojournalism and work as photo editors at a number of high-profile publications. But in the field of professional editorial photography, they lag men in pay, legitimacy, and status. Using Bourdieu’s field theory, this paper explores how gender shapes the way women experience, compete in, and negotiate the field, specifically regarding assignments, salary, sexual harassment, and tactics for achieving access to stories. Findings suggest that women use their gender as a competitive advantage however they can, but that negative capital attached to femaleness and femininity persists. The findings are based on semi-structured interviews conducted between 2017 and 2019 with 17 female professional editorial photographers, aged 23–82, who work in a variety of beats.

How does music play a role in normalising men’s sexual violence towards women? Using mainstream rock and metal music as an illustrative case study, we offer a nuanced account of the ways in which men’s sexual violence is normalised. Using a definition of sexual violence drawn from Liz Kelly’s notion of a continuum, which reframes sexual violence as the loss of women’s ability to control sexual experiences, we explore the ways in which sexual violence is a prevalent lyrical and audio-visual component of rock and metal songs. We show that a pernicious theme of rock and metal over the last 25 years is the erosion of women’s ability to refuse sexual activity and to have voice and be heard. We argue that this erosion of women’s consent takes place through the representational use of emotional abuse, controlling/coercive behaviour, and through the objectification of women. The erasure of consent presented through these methods becomes a key means of establishing sexual control. Through manipulation, the confusion of what counts as sexual violence and how it is defined, men’s sexual violence against women is normalised.

The use of live popular music performance as a platform to address gendered and sexual violence and trauma within the popular music industry can be demonstrated through the analysis of Kesha’s performance of “Praying” at the 2018 Grammy Awards. Analyzing the artist’s vocal and artistic delivery, in addition to her public persona following her allegations of sexual abuse against producer Lukasz Gottwald (Dr. Luke), illustrates how live performance—building on and contrasting with social media campaigns, such as #FreeKesha and #MeToo, and studio recordings—is a uniquely effective mode of processing individual and collective trauma.

This article extends our understanding of how university students make sense of, and respond to, sexual violence in the night-time economy (NTE). Based on semi-structured interviews with 26 students in a city in England, we examine students’ constructions of their experiences of sexual violence within the NTE, exploring their negotiations with, and resistance to, this violence. Building upon theories of postfeminism, we interrogate the possibilities for resistance within the gendered spaces of the NTE and propose a disaggregated conceptualization of agency to understand responses to sexual violence, thereby offering useful insights for challenging sexual violence in the NTE and in universities.