Fearless Hollywood women launch Time’s Up initiative to fight sexual abuse

Women have been for long treated as a second fiddle to men. Be it in work opportunities, wage pay, a boy coming to “see and approve” the girl for marriage, or the entire idea of living life on your terms; such is the hypocrisy that a woman is judged for making her choices whereas a man has the “freedom” to live life the way he wants.

2017 was indeed an extremely eventful year, especially for women. Women across borders and barriers came together to raise a voice and support each other in their fight against sexual harassment. It is widely established that women do not feel safe at their workplaces and that influential, powerful men leave no stone unturned to abuse their power and authority. The uproar in the past year has been so loud that “feminism” was declared the “word of the year” by Merriam Webster, America’s most trusted online dictionary. Women all over the World are completely fed up of the unfair behaviour that they have been facing from the past so many years and hence have come up with a campaign with the backing of some really strong and influential personalities.

A high-powered initiative named “Time’s Up” has been introduced on January 1st, 2018 with the sole purpose of correcting the power imbalance and also to fight systemic sexual harassment in Hollywood and blue-collar workplaces all over the globe.

The initiative pe-dominantly includes the following:

1. A legal defense fund to help and protect the less privileged women like nurses, workers at restaurants, stores, farms, factories and hotels with a backing of $13 million in donations.

2.This initiative focuses on legalising to penalise the companies that tolerate harassment and to discourage using the non-disclosure agreement to silence the victims.

3. A movement towards gender equality and parity at work studios, talent agencies. The initiative also requests the celebrities wearing the Golden Globes red carpet to wear black outfits and speak out to make an awareness.

Time’s Up has been specifically created to pledge support to the working-class women in an open letter signed by hundreds of prominent women in the show-business. The letter ran as a full page advertisement in The New York Times and in La Opinion, a Spanish language newspaper.

The letter says, “The struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly.”

The issue was first highlighted after the infamous case of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct came to light, after which a letter was sent on behalf of 700,000 female farmworkers, stating that they stood with the actresses in their fight against abuse. Some of the members of the Time’s Up initiative are Natalie Portman, Emma Stones, Kerry Washington, Reese Witherspoon, Donna Langley (Chairwoman of Universal Pictures), lawyers Nina L Shaw and Tina Tchen who served as Michelle Obama’s chief to staff, Maria Eitel (Co-chairwoman of Nike Foundation). The Time’s Up initiative is leaderless with every volunteer participating in as equals.

Tina Tchen has been aggressively working on the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund which is administered by the National Women’s Law Center’s Legal Network for Gender Equity. This entire process will help in connecting all the female victims of sexual harassment with the lawyers. Major donors include Ms. Witherspoon, Ms. Rhimes, Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency.

Speaking about the black colour code for the Golden Globes function, Ms. Longoria said, For years, we’ve sold these awards shows as women, with our gowns and colors and our beautiful faces and our glamour, this time the industry can’t expect us to go up and twirl around. That’s not what this moment is about.”

Women’s fight against sexual harassment has been floating since the beginning of 2017. Be it the Women’s March in Washington held the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, or during and around the release of Wonder Woman which was a women-centric film. Be it celebrities sporting the famous Dior “We are all Feminist” t-shirt or Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director of Dior, pushing the feminist bracket further and raising a question with a caption t-shirt asking,”Why have there been no women artists?” (a question apt enough and rooted in the minds of every living women) or the extremely famous #MeToo campaign, where millions of women came out sharing personal stories of sexual harassment and assault on social media.