What prevented the token woman from getting her diet coke from the soda machine?
She didn’t have enough quotas to pay for it.
Germany has taken a step toward requiring what has not happened voluntarily: putting women on the management boards of the country’s largest companies.
On Wednesday, Germany’s cabinet approved a draft law that would require stock exchange-listed companies with executive boards of more than three members to have at least one woman and one man on those boards.
Fine with me. Just as long as they can ensure that 97% of the movies shown at the Berlinale remain as crappy as they’ve always been.
This morning’s Berlinale Competition line-up announcement featured 33% films (six of 18) with women directors, including one project, DAU. Natasha, which is co-directed by a man and a woman (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel).
That’s a drop on last year’s percentage of 41%, when seven of 17 pics selected were from female filmmakers (the figure is seven of 16, 44%, if you don’t count Zhang Yimou’s One Second, which was pulled before it screened).
Still, the Berlin fest continues to compare favourably to the other major European festivals. In 2019, Venice featured just two women directors of the 21 films in its Competition (less than 10%), while Cannes selected four of 21 (19%).
Berlin Competition Lineup: Kelly Reichardt, Sally Potter, Abel Ferrara, Christian Petzold; Disney’s ‘Onward’ & Hillary Clinton Also Heading To Fest
And 97 percent crappy movies. Which is actually down from past years. So keep up the good work or something.
The Berlin Film Festival on Wednesday unveiled its Generations sidebar lineup, consisting of 59 children and youth films, with 58 percent of the titles, both feature-length and short films, directed by women.
Berlin organizers recently also said that the festival’s co-production market, where producers look for partners to finance their new projects, will feature more than 50 percent female-directed films for the first time in its 17-year history.
PS: What prevented the token woman from getting her diet coke from the soda machine? She didn’t have enough quotas to pay for it.
That’s odd. I live here and I can’t hear a damned thing.
Ursula von der Leyen asks MEPs to back her as first female European commission president- Ursula von der Leyen has championed gender equality in her appeal to MEPs to back her as the first female president of the European commission, telling the European parliament: “We represent half of our population. We want our fair share.”
In a related matter, please take part in this important survey.
“Die Welt schreit nach mehr Europa.”
That means antidemocratic.
Women in Germany won the right to vote in 1918, but a century later they still do not enjoy equal representation. Though the country is led by a woman — who will, most likely, be succeeded by another woman — fewer than a third of the members of the federal Parliament, the Bundestag, are female.
That’s why leading figures from all major German parties are now calling for parity: a 50-50 quota for male and female representatives in the Bundestag and the 16 state-level Parliaments. But is achieving a gender balance in Germany’s legislatures worth weakening another hard-fought accomplishment, the right to free electoral choice?
In a word, no.
Der gute Zweck heiligt nicht den Zwang.
Sorry. I meant streaming crap quota, of course. You know, when it comes to what Netflix and Amazon Prime is allowed to offer its customers here in Europe?
That’s right. The European Commission is planning to introduce a quota ensuring that at least 20 percent of the content offered by Netflix and Amazon Prime are European productions. This “identity-building measure” is necessary, the commissioners say, in order to, well, build identity (the European Commission’s identity?) and of course to continue to protect films and series that nobody wants or intends to watch but to keep on subsidizing anyway (“culture” in ze Europe is regulated by unelected state bureaucrats who know better than you and are here to help you whether you want their help or not and not by yucky old and vulgar supply and demand – just in case you were wondering).
“Wir halten 20 Prozent für sehr maßvoll.”
Who would have thought that? Only eleven percent of German troops are currently women. This must change, of course.
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, herself one of the eleven percent, has decided that in the medium-term, the percentage of women currently not doing anything that other soldiers in other armies do (some call it combat) must be increased to 20 percent.
The reason behind this appears to be that by effectively reducing the combat strength of an army, this will effectively increase the combat strength of an army. Not your own army or anything, but still.
The inglorious Bundeswehr: The German army was never meant to function on its own. Now it barely functions at all.
Elf Prozent der Truppe ist derzeit weiblich. Verteidigungsministerin Ursula von der Leyen will diesen Wert verbessern und ruft ein neues Ziel aus: “Auf mittlere Sicht” soll der Frauenanteil auf 20 Prozent steigen.
The city of Berlin may be poor but sexy, but it is not poor but sexy enough to not be able to scrape up enough needed tax euros to introduce a traffic light woman quota.
I don’t make this stuff up, people.
“Women need to be more present in the appearances of our capital’s streets,” Martina Matischok-Yesilcimen, Germany’s Social Democratic Party district leader who signed a recent motion (PDF) to introduce female walk signals, told Bloomberg News.
“We’re a diverse city, and that deserves to be seen.”
PS: And have a happy election day or something while you’re at it.
Thank goodness this gender quota nonsense is finally about to be settled so a new coalition government can be formed in Germany.
Word has it that the CDU has agreed to let the SPD in if the proposed legislation stipulates only that each gender will be represented by at least one gender each.
German companies listed on the stock exchange will need at least 30% of supervisory board members to be female from 2016, according to proposed legislation.
This is German regulation madness at its best. Or, to be fair, Berliner Green Shirt regulation madness at its best.
The city district council of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (the Greens) is currently causing not just a little bewilderment by refusing to name the square in front of Berlin’s Jewish Museum after Moses Mendelssohn, the German Jewish Enlightenment philosopher. No, not because they’re anti-Semites (at least not openly). It’s because Mendelssohn was not a woman.
You see, the district parliament decided back in 2005 (Greens and SPD) that 50 percent of the district’s streets and squares had to be named after women. Until that goal is reached, no new streets or squares will be allowed to be named after men, except in exceptional cases. Which this one isn’t, I guess.
This is about as small-minded as you can get, of course, and it fits perfectly with mainstream Green ideology, I find, in that nothing the Greens ever do or say can ever be allowed to be labelled as being small-minded or petit bourgeois in any way. But of course practically everything they do, well, is.
Die kleingeistige Posse spielt vor der Tür des weltweit bekannten Jüdischen Museums. Die Hauptakteure hocken in der mit Abstand stärksten Fraktion des Bezirks: Es sind die Grünen. Sie schämen sich nicht, „das leider falsche Geschlecht“ Mendelssohns in einem Satz mit dem „Projekt Unisextoiletten“ abzuhandeln.
PS: Speaking of Berlin city government in action: Oh boy! The new tourist tax is here! The new tourist tax is here!
Observing Hermann 