Mila Kunis wrote a powerful essay about sexism in the workplace and it couldn’t be more important
While things are definitely progressing in terms of gender equality, it’s still important for people to speak out about sexism and feminism. That’s why we totally applaud Mila Kunis for writing about sexism in the workplace.
Writing an essay for A Plus, the actor and producer wrote about the sexism that she’s faced in Hollywood, as well as the constant stream of micro-aggressions that women face everyday.
Opening the essay, Mila detailed how a producer told her she would “Never work in this town again” if she didn’t pose semi-nude for a men’s magazine to promote a movie she’d starred in.
Stating that she felt objectified, Mila said that she put her foot down and refused.
“I was no longer willing to subject myself to a naïve compromise that I had previously been willing to,” she wrote. “And guess what? The world didn’t end. The film made a lot of money and I did work in this town again, and again, and again.”
Continuing, the star wrote that the producer had vocalized the fears that many women feel in the workplace.
This was something that she herself had feared.
“It’s what we are conditioned to believe — that if we speak up, our livelihoods will be threatened; that standing our ground will lead to our demise. We don’t want to be kicked out of the sandbox for being a “bitch.” So we compromise our integrity for the sake of maintaining the status quo and hope that change is coming,” she wrote.
Following the incident, Mila had a wakeup call.
With candor, Mila said that she realized she was complicit in encouraging inequalities between the sexes because she’d decided to “play by the rules.” It was this that encouraged the star to start her own production company, Orchard Farm Productions, in 2014.
However, things weren’t an immediate utopia, as Mila details. On the verge of signing a deal with a major studio, a producer they had initially approached to work on a project reduced the 33-year-old to her marriage with Ashton Kutcher and her ability to have children.
“Yes, it is only one small comment,” she wrote. “But it’s these very comments that women deal with day in and day out in offices, on calls, and in emails — microaggressions that devalue the contributions and worth of hard-working women.”
While Mila recognizes that gender bias is embedded in society, she wrote that she’s decided that enough is enough.
Passionately calling out for a change, Mila pledged to call out and confront comments like those she’d been subjected to.
“If this is happening to me, it is happening more aggressively to women everywhere,” she concluded. “I am fortunate that I have reached a place that I can stop compromising and stand my ground, without fearing how I will put food on my table. I am also fortunate that I have the platform to talk about this experience in the hope of bringing one more voice to the conversation so that women in the workplace feel a little less alone and more able to push back for themselves.”
Read Mila Kunis’ full essay here.
Mila Kunis’ essay is so, so important. It was recently reported that at the rate things were going, it would take 136 years until women were earning the same as men, which is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.
As she wrote, if possible it’s important to face up against micro-agressions so that systematic and embedded behaviours can be changed, and the battle toward equality can progress.
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