I’m a white relatively privileged woman in a very male dominated industry. Suffice to say I have both privileges and problem areas in my day to day experiences. Before I became a feminist, I was convinced that as long as you worked hard and proved your worth, there was ->

-> nothing stopping you from going as far as you wanted in this industry. Then I started noticing how other people (men) were given chances I was not. I started noticing how other people (men) were allowed to behave almost any way they wanted and we women were not. ->

-> I think I hit my limit when discussing how one of the artists at the studio got hired and the person I spoke to said “yeah, the studio manager thought she was cute and wanted to date her so he hired her”, completely ignoring her skill as an artist. ->

-> After that the evidence of systemic mistreatment started piling up. People (men) I was equally competent as getting better offers, being promoted past me, me being policed in how I spoke, what I said, when I spoke and how my ideas were received compared to other->

people’s ideas (men’s). If I had a dollar for every idea that had been attributed to another person on the team (a man), I’d probably not have to work anymore. This was a tough discovery. It took me a long time to realize how much misogyny I had internalized and how ->

systematic that misogyny was. At first I blamed it all on myself. I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t creative enough, I wasn’t enough of a leader to be considered for more senior positions. But as I realized that this was systemic, I could also place some of the blame->

for how I myself had behaved outside of myself. I had been taught those negative patterns that I was repeating. I didn’t know better, because nobody had taught me differently. That insight and my own sense of justice has guided me so far. ->

Change is difficult. Admitting and coming to terms with being complicit in systemic oppression is difficult, but it gets somewhat easier to handle if you give yourself the benefit of a doubt - you were taught these patterns. You didn’t know better. ->

It’s only if you repeat the patterns after having learned that, that you become truly complicit. Break the patterns. Change.