WHY WET EXISTS

Equal opportunity still does not exist in the entertainment industry.

Only 17% of theater productions in the US are written by women
Only 16% of theater productions in the US are directed by women
Only 15% of film directors, producers, writers, and editors in the US are women.
Only 20% of film studio executives working in the US are women*

Additionally, the representation of women and girls in the media is often based in stereotype, and sets up impossible and unhealthy expectations women and girls feel they must live up to.

According to studies, Women and girls of all body types are equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes**

Teen-age girls who viewed commercials depicting women who modeled the unrealistically thin-ideal type of beauty caused adolescent girls to feel less confident, more angry and more dissatisfied with their weight and appearance.***

If we continue to accept the under-representation and misrepresentation of women in the media, an industry that defines and reflects our culture, then we are responsible for supporting and perpetuating inequality.

This is not a woman’s issue, this is a human issue.

WET WAS CREATED TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM.

WET founders with Paul Rudd, Ally Sheedy, Adrienne Shelly, Callie Thorne, Billy Crudup,
following WET’s reading of Adrienne Shelly’s scrennplay The Morgan Stories

* Susan Jonas and Suzanne Bennett, Report on the Status of Women: A Limited Engagement?, New York State council on the Arts, (January 2002). Martha Lauzen, PhD The Celluloid Ceiling (2006).
** University of Missouri-Columbia (March 2007)
***Hargreaves, D. (2002). Idealized Women in TV Ads Make Girls Feel Bad. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 21, 287-308