Laura Dawn > Quotes

“[Q: What would you change if you could]
I would put more women in charge. I’m not naïve enough to think that this would fix everything, but I think it’s worth trying-because it’s worth noting that at no point in history have we tried it.”
― Laura Dawn

“I did a study, called Men, that I’m hoping to make into a film. It’s about testosterone and how it acts in homogenized groups of male leadership. It’s about looking at what happens when you just have men at the fore of the political, financial, religious and cultural systems of the world. Historically, these systems were-and let’s be honest, still are-run by men: mostly white men. The continuation of this could be the end of us, because it’s one of the reasons we’ve had such intractability around climate change. In a closed system of male-dominated leadership, men’s testosterone and cortisol levels rise, which produces a really negative cascade of effects. It produces an acute focus on short-term threats and a very long-lens focus on long-term threats: so terrorism feels very, very immediate, but climate change-which is much more likely to be the bigger catastrophe-is put off. Men also fire dopamine and serotonin when they engage in conflict, so in these situations they exhibit much more risk-taking behavior.
Women have somewhat of a different leadership style, so when you inject a tipping point of 30 per cent women into a ruling system of men, the entire group changes biochemically-communication, collaboration and consensus-building becomes more possible.
My big theory is that, if more women were involved in the leadership of the world, in every country, we might see less war and more action on some of the direst threats. There are studies that bear this theory out; the countries that have the most progressive policies toward women generally have more women in office and in business. These countries also have the highest gross domestic products, they have the highest happiness indices and they have the lowest incidences of war. The countries that have the most repressive policies towards women are in endless cycles of war and tend to be doing very, very poorly.”
― Laura Dawn

“The author Rebecca Traister makes the point that the entire American economy was built not only on slave labour-which is something we're all aware of-but also on the free labour of women. We have an entire economy that, for many, many decades, was propelled by men at work. This entire system doesn’t work without someone at home taking care of the family, doing unpaid labour. A lot of the work that has historically fallen to women-the care of a household, the care of children, the care of the elderly-is unpaid labour. And this won’t do anymore. It’s time to look at more aggressive ways of addressing the power imbalance.”
― Laura Dawn

“Sometimes, reading the news feels like an onslaught of negativity, but the truth is that the human race gets a little less violent every year. We get a little better all the time. And the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
― Laura Dawn