SUMMARY:Pikeville is a small city of 6,700 nestled in the mountains of eastern Kentucky--a rural area that has struggled to survive the decline of the coal industry. Now, local residents are pinning their futures on health care, which is desperately needed for a population whose life expectancy lags years behind the national average. Amna Nawaz reports for our new series, The Future of Work.
SUMMARY:It was a night of political firsts for Democrats. Christine Hallquist is the first openly transgender person to win a major party's nomination for governor. Jahana Hayes could become the first black woman in Congress from New England. And Ilhan Omar, a former refugee, is poised to be Congress’ first Somali-American. Judy Woodruff talks with Lisa Desjardins and Stuart Rothenberg about the results.
SUMMARY: Young Americans don’t know a lot about the rest of the world, says Dana Mortenson, CEO of World Savvy, and the byproduct is fear of what we don’t understand. Her company reimagines K-12 education to leverage diversity as an asset. Mortenson gives her Brief but Spectacular take on being a savvy global citizen.
Barbie, America’s best-selling doll, is getting a new look. Mattel announced Thursday that it is introducing three new Barbie’s with different body shapes for the first time in its history.
Barbie’s makeover reflects a changing marketplace where diversity is no longer just a buzzword, but a reality.
“Mattel and toy companies have been challenged by world in which so many ways to play,” says toy industry expert Richard Gottlieb.
Gottlieb is joined by Megan Garber, a culture writer for The Atlantic to discuss the business reasons behind this decision and Barbie’s impact on our culture and young girls.
SUMMARY: Almost two years after major tech firms began publicizing their diversity numbers, recent figures show that Silicon Valley employees are still overwhelmingly white and male. Hari Sreenivasan reports on the steps these companies are taking to address their race and gender problems, from software algorithms to education and recruitment initiatives.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Silicon Valley, the home of the California tech industry, has long been criticized for its lack of diversity. Almost two years after major companies, led by Google and Intel, started to publicize their diversity numbers, the ethnic and gender makeup of the industry’s work force remains almost the same.
Analysis of employees at the leading tech firms that report such figures reveals, on average, 71 percent are men, 29 percent are women, 60 percent identify as white, 23 percent Asian, 8 percent Latino, and 7 percent black.
So, what exactly is Silicon Valley doing to improve its diversity?
Hari Sreenivasan takes a look in the first of two stories.
JOELLE EMERSON, CEO, Paradigm: Raise your hand if you have heard of unconscious bias before?
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The notion that hidden bias can be methodically stamped out of the workplace has become popular with tech companies across Silicon Valley.
JOELLE EMERSON:By managing unconscious bias, we make better decisions. So, unconscious bias acts as a significant barrier to objective, data-driven decision making.
HARI SREENIVASAN: That was the message being delivered by Joelle Emerson, a former sexual harassment litigator who now spends most of her time helping multibillion-dollar start-ups diversify their work forces.
SUMMARY: American technology companies like Apple, Facebook and Google are striving to improve gender and racial diversity in their workforce. Having revealed their staffs are predominantly white men, the companies are spending furiously to recruit and keep people who aren’t. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
SUMMARY: In a survey of the 100 top grossing films between 2007 and 2014, 30 percent of all speaking or named characters were women; less than 30 percent of such roles went to actors who were not white. Jeffrey Brown talks to Dylan Marron, blogger for "Every Spoken Word," and Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post about the widespread lack of diversity in Hollywood.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Special effects, action and suspense, big production films in recent years have provided plenty of what audiences have come to expect, including, according to various studies, a widespread lack of diversity.
The latest research comes from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. The survey of the annual 100 top grossing films between 2007 and 2014 found that just 30 percent of all speaking or named characters were women, while 73 percent of such roles went to whites.
As to the filmmakers, only about 2 percent of the movies were directed by women. The Web site Every Single Word has made a mission of highlighting the lack of diversity in movies by compiling every line spoken by a person of color in any major film. This video, from the 2014 movie “Maleficent,” lasted just 18 seconds.
This creator of Every Single Word, Dylan Marron, joins us now. He’s also an actor and writer. Also with us, Washington Post movie critic Ann Hornaday.
Well, Dylan Marron, you have been documenting this for a long time. How does this new study sharpen the picture? What jumps out at you?
DYLAN MARRON, Every Single Word: I think a lot jumps out.
One of the biggest things that jumped out for me is the correlation between black directors and putting black characters in their movie. And that speaks a lot to this conversation we have of we need more creators. The creators are already out there, but what we need do is we need to take those creators and we need to project their stories onto a bigger screen and they need to be distributed to a larger audience.
And that way, there will be more accurate reflections of the populations that they’re serving.
JEFFREY BROWN: You’re an actor yourself, so you have seen this play out?
DYLAN MARRON: I have seen this firsthand.
Yes, I have seen it in meetings with agents. I have seen it in casting calls. And I have just seen it in general reception.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, Ann Hornaday, we have talked about this before. For both women and African-Americans, actors and directors, there have been some very successful and critically acclaimed films, especially in recent years. Do we see these as exceptions? What do you see when you look out there?
ANN HORNADAY, Film Critic, The Washington Post: Well, absolutely.
You know, the last couple of years have really seen a flowering, and we have seen this wonderful renaissance in African-American filmmaking, from the likes of Dee Rees and Ava DuVernay and Ryan Coogler, and Gina Prince-Bythewood, of course, who has been around for a while, but has just been doing wonderful work.
So there’s been a lot to celebrate. And then this year, a number of the top 10 movies this year are female-centric, from things like “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “Cinderella” to “Spy” and “Trainwreck,” also did very well this summer.
And there are smaller movies that are featuring women, like “Ricki and the Flash” is coming out this weekend and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Things like this, studies like this, we get these statistics as sort of a steady drumbeat, and it’s just a reminder that we should remember not to fall over ourselves with gratitude for crumbs, when the bigger picture, as you point out, is a lot more sobering.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): The city of Ferguson, with a population of 21,000, is more than two-thirds African-American, but just three of its 53 police officers are black. It’s a factor in other communities across the country as well.
And we explore the issue Tracie Keesee, the co-founder of the UCLA Center for Policing Equity. She’s also a 25-year veteran of the Denver Police Department. And Commander Malik Aziz, chairman of the national black police association. He is deputy chief of the Dallas Police Department and has 23 years experience in law enforcement.
Tracie Keesee, let me start with you. And I do want to start with a question about today’s news, because there’s still a lot of confusion and even anger over the issue of when the officer involved in the shooting was named and the release of the video of Michael Brown.
What’s your reaction to that today?
TRACIE KEESEE, UCLA Center for Policing Equity: Well, I think there is a couple of things going on here.
First of all, if you want to have the trust of the community, transparency is always going to be key. And the faster you can get information out to the community is going to be helpful.
I think, in addition to that, you have to balance the safety of the officer at the time, before we knew his name, to make sure that they were safe, and he was receiving threats. But I think you also have to that balance, but I think you also have to be mindful of the community that you serve and that they really deserve to hear who is involved in what and what’s going on with in the investigation.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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