‘The Hollywood Reporter’ Is Done Ranking Women
In the name of feminism, gender equality, and sisterhood, two magazines covering the entertainment industry will no longer publish lists that rank powerful and influential women against one another.
For The Hollywood Reporter, this means putting an end to its annual ‘Women in Entertainment Power 100 list’ (a 23-year-long tradition), and Billboard will cancel its list of the 50 biggest women in music.
President and chief creative officer Janice Min announced the changes on Wednesday, referring to the rankings as “a female cage match.”
“We accidentally created a beauty pageant of brains where only one woman gets crowned,” writes Min, who relaunched THR in 2010. “Some women have publicly cried upon seeing their rankings. That is funny to some people. But it’s depressing as hell to me.”
THR began ranking female professionals in 1992, inspired by Paramount Pictures’ recent hiring of chairwoman Sherry Lansing. But, explains Min, in the two-plus decades since, powerful women are still somewhat of a rarity in Hollywood. “The acceptance of women as ‘lesser’ in Hollywood is so commonplace, it’s as if we’ve grown comfortable living with our own ugly furniture,” she says. “We don’t even know it looks bad.”
The highest ranked woman in 2014 was NBCUniversal chairman Bonnie Hammer.
Min hopes that the change will help women work together to achieve success and greatness, rather than pitting them against one another. But that’s not to say that the age of listing human beings in ascending order is over. THR and Billboard will begin creating annual “Power classes” of 100 people and 50 people, respectively. And, in honor of the fifth anniversary of its relaunch, THR will release a list of entertainment’s most powerful people, both men and women.
That way, both men and women can cry publicly in equal quantities.
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