Meghan Markle Is Teaming Up With Geena Davis to Change Our Perceptions of Moms on TV
On Thursday, the Duchess of Sussex and the nonprofit Moms First are announcing the results of a study on television moms with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.
BY ERIN VANDERHOOF
Before anyone knew her as the Duchess of Sussex,
Suits fans knew
Meghan Markle for her role as Rachel Zane, the USA Network show’s wry and intelligent fan-favorite paralegal. Mirroring Meghan’s 2018 trip down the aisle and pivot to philanthropy, Rachel’s storyline over seven seasons also ended with a wedding and a big job in a new city. Now a mother of two, Meghan is setting her sights on the next phase of life as it appears on the small screen. The duchess is teaming up with actor
Geena Davis and Moms First, a longtime charity partner of the Archewell Foundation, to raise awareness about the ways television depicts characters who are mothers, backed up by data gathered from programming across 2022.
On Thursday, Moms First and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media shared
the results of a study that shows how those portrayals don’t always reflect reality, and argues that a change is necessary if we want to shift public attitudes and policy. The study, funded by the Archewell Foundation, found that though TV moms have become slightly more diverse, they are still underrepresented as earners and are still largely young, white, and thin. In 2022, when a couple with kids under 18 had a clear breadwinner, they were male 86.5% of the time. The study found that childcare and the realities of keeping a house running are largely erased.
In an interview with
Vanity Fair, Davis says she was surprised by how “dated” the various portrayals of TV moms seemed. “The representation of motherhood seemed like such a throwback,” she says. “It didn’t reflect modern reality anywhere near as closely as I had hoped or imagined.”
In a statement, Meghan explained her reasoning for signing on to the project. “My past experience as an actress, and now today as a producer and mother, have amplified my belief in the critical importance of supporting women and moms both behind the lens and in front of it,” she said. “This report about the portrayal of mothers in entertainment highlights the gaps we need to fill to achieve true representation in the content we create and consume, and I’m honored to support this work through the Archewell Foundation.”
Davis has been working on issues of women’s representation since she founded the institute in 2004, based on the idea that presenting producers and film executives with the numbers about gender disparity in media could lead to tangible change. “Images have a profound impact on people’s perceptions of themselves and others, and therefore the images can be used to create good,” she says. “I saw that children’s movies and TV made specifically for kids seemed to have a huge gender disparity…. What if we’re training kids from the beginning to have unconscious gender bias by showing boys as more important and taking up more space in the world?”
In the past, the institute has looked at subjects including diversity in media, gender stereotypes onscreen, and the industry’s approach to mental health, and the results of the institute’s studies have had an effect on industry opinions. But for their look into TV motherhood, they teamed up with Moms First to aim for an even broader impact. When founder and CEO
Reshma Saujani founded the charity as the “Marshall Plan for Moms” in 2021, Archewell signed on as an early donor. Since then, the organization has been lobbying to pass paid leave policies and push for reform to the nation’s broken childcare system.
“Building Moms First came out of the pandemic and really seeing millions of women getting pushed out of their workforce because we live in a country that didn’t allow mothers to be both mothers and workers,” Saujani says. Her previous experience as
the founder of Girls Who Code helped her realize that changing the role of women in a given field is about providing opportunity along with changing hearts and minds. “For me it was about, ‘What is the impact on culture?’ If you don’t value something, you don’t respect it, and you don’t invest in it. When I looked at TV, it’s like you didn’t see images that really accurately reflected motherhood in pop culture.”
The report notes that only 15% of TV parents are ever shown doing domestic work like cooking or cleaning. Still, less than 10% of TV parents had a messy house. Saujani says that only seeing images of perfect houses without any of the labor that keeps a home running can help feed feelings of “mom guilt” and fuel a gendered imbalance in housework. Davis adds that these informal taboos can also limit the imaginations of the people who make TV. “We’re not at all saying, ‘Hey, portray mothers better by making them seem even more perfect.’ What we’re saying is they’re leaving out realities of motherhood—the difficulties and the challenges,” she says.
Davis says her advocacy work came out of her experience playing Thelma in 1991’s
Thelma & Louise and watching the film become a cult classic. “I had really wanted to be in the movie because I thought they were great characters, but I wasn’t prepared for the reaction that it had,” she says. “Suddenly people wanted to tell me how the movie impacted them.” The characters are complicated, but they were nevertheless important and meaningful to the audience. “It made me suddenly realize that we don’t give women [empowering films]. It’s very rare to give women the experience of being able to identify with the female characters and live vicariously through a female character.”
Davis mentioned that she hasn’t had the chance to catch the duchess’s role in
Suits, but she is thankful for the support from the Archewell Foundation. “We love having her support and the support of Archwell,” Davis says. “We can’t do it without financial support like that, and it’s obviously a subject that’s very near and dear to her heart.”
Saujani thanked Meghan for the work she has done since the pandemic to support the charity and make issues like paid leave a central part of her platform. “She had a line she would say, and I always steal it from her: The most important title I have is mother,” Saujani says. “The one ask is to show our multidimensionality. Show us both as moms and workers, don’t just show one or the other. Show us as we are: both.”
vanityfair.com
