Toppling the patriarchy behind the TV screen

“Transparent” creator, producer, and director Jill Soloway, accepting the Emmy for comedy directing on Sunday, called to “topple the patriarchy!” “When you take women, people of color, trans people, queer people, and you put them at the center of the story — the subjects instead of the objects,” she said, “you change the world.”

And she’s right. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” featured Mary as a television producer in 1970, when TV women were wives and moms, and the show addressed premarital sex, homosexuality and divorce — topics not much discussed in polite circles. In the 1980s and ’90s, Roseanne Barr humorously spotlighted gender prejudice in clothing choice, household chores and parenting right in our own family rooms, while mega-smart feminist “Murphy Brown” featured a female boss and sparked a national debate on parenthood. Now the Emmy-honored “Modern Family” and “Transparent” TV series portray LGBT lives in the real and intimate ways once reserved for the cisgender. The more complicated, nuanced, rich and increasingly more open world is first seen by many of us on our TVs.

As Soloway suggested, though, one thing hasn’t changed: The patriarchy still rules TV. Behind the screen, women fill only 26 percent of important roles such as creators, writers and producers, including only 12 percent of directors — percentages unchanged from a decade ago.

What’s behind the screen plays out in what we see on it. Despite the tremendous success of shows centered on women, like “Homeland,” “Orphan Black” and “Veep,” four of five current shows feature casts with more males than females. Across all platforms — network, cable and streaming — gender stereotyping still abounds. Onscreen women are younger than their male counterparts, and thinner and more provocatively clothed. They are more often identified by marital status and portrayed as focused on romance, and less often seen as leaders, or even at work.

But when women hold key behind-the-scenes positions, those stereotypes begin to fall away. Female writers, directors and producers correlate with more onscreen female presence and less gender stereotyping. With a female show creator, the effect is magnified.

And television shapes us. The average American child spends seven hours a day on entertainment media. Boys — or white boys, anyway — step back from their screens feeling better about themselves, but the more media a girl consumes, the worse she is likely to feel about herself.

Soloway sits at the top of the directing world at the moment, as one of only two women, along with “Modern Family” director Gail Mancuso, ever to win repeat Emmys. She gained this position from outside the established system: “Transparent” is one of the first shows created not for network or cable, but for Amazon Studios, founded by Seattle technology entrepreneur Jeff Bezos. Soloway, not dependent on the television patriarchy for her career (at least not at the moment), can stand on the Emmy stage and call to tear down a system that women, minority and non-cisgender directors working within traditional television platforms question at their own peril.

Soloway, in giving her Emmy speech, looked a bit like the onscreen women who came before her: strong women making us stand up and take notice of gender presumptions we ought long ago to have flung away.

“We’re gonna make it after all,” we used to hear each week at the beginning of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Perhaps we are, with women like Soloway leading the charge.