A public lecture on the root causes of gender inequality in global screen industries will be presented by the York University Communication Studies Department on 
Wednesday, Nov. 7th from 2pm-4pm and will feature speaker Amanda Coles.
The talk, titled “Experimenting for Equality: Gender, Cultural Policy and Global Screen Industries,” will take place at in room 2008, Dahdaleh Building, Keele Campus. Coles is a Lecturer of Arts and Cultural Management and Employment Relations at Deakin Business School located in Melbourne Australia.
Her research advocates for a labour-based analysis of Canadian cultural policy that places the interests of cultural workers at the centre of research and policy processes, paying particular attention to how policy shapes labour markets as well as the quality and quantity of work in the cultural sector. In addition to her teaching and research, she also consults for industry groups on a range of labour market, workforce development and policy-related issues.
Her talk focuses on the role of gender inequality in defining features of work and labour markets in the global screen industries, there is no clear consensus on the root causes of the problem.
Since 2014, national and sub-national jurisdictions across North America, the EU and Australasia have introduced a variety of policy experiments to address inclusion and representation issues in the screen-based production sector. She presents these experiments as three distinct policy typologies. Each typology takes a very different approach to the policy “object,” or the focus of the policy intervention. Analysis of the available evidence from each typology shows that the least contentious approaches to addressing the “gender” problem are also the least effective. We often start policy analysis with an analysis of the policy instrument being deployed in relation to a particular problem. She argues that we must first query of the object of a policy intervention in order to evaluate the logics that underpin the policy rationale. Thus we can begin to evaluate how these experiments conceptualise the root causes of gender inequality and consequently, the ability, or likelihood, of the current experiments to promote long-term industry transformation.
The York University community is invited to attend, including administrators, students, faculty, staff. All are welcome.
The event is organized by the Communication Studies Department, represented by Professor Anne Maclennan, Chair of Communication Studies, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies.