My parents are both from Vermont, very old-fashioned New England. We heated our house with wood my father chopped. My mom grew all of our food. We were very underexposed to everything.
— Geena Davis
Disney has proved without a shadow of a doubt that movies with a female lead work.
Identifying with a character is one of the best parts of seeing a movie, but as women, we've had to train ourselves to experience the male journey.
There are woefully few women CEOs in the world, but there can be lots of them in films.
The motto of my institute has always been, 'If they can see it, they can be it.' And it's literally true. If we show something on-screen, it will change what happens in real life.
The big takeaway I got from 'Thelma & Louise' was the reaction of women who had seen the movie being so profound, so different. It was overwhelming, and it made me realise how few opportunities we give women to feel excited and empowered by female characters, to come out of a movie pumped.
I was once up for a part, and the male star was also producing the movie. They were talking about meeting with him or having an audition with him, and then we get the message, 'He wants to have dinner with you.' I said, 'Is that the audition, or is it that he just wants to have dinner with me?'
I had one date in high school - that was it, and he didn't ask me out again, because I was taller than everybody. I was very gangly and awkward, and I wore weird clothes that I made.
If I go to hotels, they always say, 'Welcome back', even when I've never been there before.
It's really important for boys to see that girls take up half of the planet - which we do.
Look at the number of cop shows and lawyer shows and forensics shows... I think there could be room for two quite different examinations of the same political office.
Somebody warned me early on to be very careful about brushing up against the chocolate.
We're making this as entertainment. But God willing, if this show stays on and people see a woman in that office for a while, I think it will help people become more used to it. It's certainly about time that we had a few female presidents.
If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.
I haven't ever gone to any Mensa meetings.
I have a Web site that parents and girls can use to learn about Title IX and take action if they find their school is not in compliance. Thirty years after Title IX passed, 80 percent of schools are not in compliance.
I was really lucky that I had an aunt who was very inspiring to me. She was different than anybody in my family on either side.
One thing I always want to clear up was the notion that I 'took time off to have a baby.' A lot people leapt to that conclusion because becoming a parent happened to coincide with film roles tapering off.
What I didn't realize until much later, in hindsight, was I had subconsciously been choosing projects where the woman was in charge of her own destiny.
You can't snap your fingers, and suddenly half of Congress is women.
Women are half the population of the world, and yet there are so few female characters on-screen.
I was averaging about one movie a year my whole career, and that was because I'm fussy. I probably could have done more.
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 am completely obsessed with numbers and data. I have become a scientist in later life.
We're showing kids a world that is very scantily populated with women and female characters. They should see female characters taking up half the planet, which we do.
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.
A woman as the leader of the Free World is an impossibility. Muslim countries won't talk to you.
I just read that 81 percent of Americans are ready to vote for a woman. So it sounds like America is ready.
It's a fantasy that we could have a president who could actually make choices based on what's right, rather than having to weigh the political fallout. But that's sort of what we're showing. And you can dream.
This dapper little mouse that wore such cute clothes and said such interesting things, yeah. I thought it was a great idea to have a mouse like that in your family, so now I get to see what it was like.
Rosie knows how to play ball. She's an athlete, for sure.
I have an elbow that bends the wrong way, and I'd do things like stand in an elevator and the doors would close, and I'd pretend that my arm had got caught in it, and then I'd scream, 'Ow, ow, put it back!'
Certainly 'Wonder Woman' needed to be made, and I'm so beyond thrilled with how it came out. I met Patty Jenkins, and I told her, 'I'm sure you're going to make a sequel, and if you need anybody Amazonian, there's always me. I'm available.'
Film roles really did start to dry up when I got into my 40s.
How do we encourage a lot more girls to pursue science, technology, and engineering careers? By casting droves of women in STEM jobs today in movies and on TV.
I never intended to become a data head. I could never have predicted it would play such an important role in my life. Yet here we are: My Institute on Gender in Media has sponsored the largest amount of research ever done on gender depictions in media, covering a 20-year-plus span.
I remember when 'A League of Their Own' was coming out in '92, when I was doing interviews, it seemed like every interviewer at some point would say, 'So... would you consider this a feminist movie?' People are worried that it's a taboo thing, so I took great relish in saying, 'Yes, I would. Write that, yes.'
Having been in some roles that really resonated with women, I became hyper-aware of how women are represented in Hollywood.
Dressing up used to be more of a thing. My dad wore a suit always. Now you think, why bother?
When I was first starting out was also when I first started really paying attention to the Oscars and stuff like that. And I remember thinking, 'Wow, everything is great for women in Hollywood, because Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Jessica Lange, Sally Field - they're all doing incredible work.'
I've always looked up to him, even though he is shorter.
I played this character twice in live action, and now I've become an animated character. It was actually fun to see myself drawn - I've never been a drawn character before.
As an Independent, she has no party backing... Her being the first Independent president trumps the fact that she's a woman. It causes even more upheaval in Washington than her being female.
So many other countries have had female leaders, in fact the U.S. ranks 61st in female representation in government and I think it is startling and sign of a change that needs to be made.
Something's like crossed over in me and I can't go back. I couldn't live.
Archers are pretty focused.
Archery is something that I took up later and didn't know I had a natural aptitude for.
