LA Mayor Eric Garcetti Issues Challenge on Gender Equity: ‘Just Look, Just Measure and Just Act’ (Video)

Power Women Summit: “If government can do it, come on, private sector, step up!” says Garcetti

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti took the stage during TheWrap’s Power Women Summit on Friday to encourage everyone to stop dragging their feet if they want to take the Road to 50/50 by 2020, and instead “just look, just measure and just act.”

“It is important for us to give voice and new narrative, but it is the action what we leave behind with our work that is the most important,” Garcetti told the women in attendance at the summit at downtown L.A.’s Intercontinental hotel. “We are a city that doesn’t minimize or mock women that say #MeToo. We believe them. This is a city in which we know that our work comes from understanding gender everywhere that we go. And we can only do that when we are ourselves, in the words of Marcel Proust, not just going to new places, but seeing the world through new eyes. And to me that’s the challenge that I put forward to my city, to the companies that are here, to the organizations that are here, and started that at home as well.”

Garcetti noted that his office of a few hundred employees, “now has a 100 percent dollar for dollar match of men to women in this office,” adding: “And they tell us government is slow. If government can do it, come on, private sector, step up!”

“In this city we have refused to stop at protests on the streets or statements on line, we’ve taken the energy that we see coming from women and people who believe in gender,” Garcetti said. “And to the few men that might be in this room, don’t own this issue because you have a wife or you have a mother — everybody has a mother. Own it because you are a human being who wants to see a just world and a place in which 50 percent of our brilliance should never be left behind.”

“It isn’t that difficult,” he said. “We have people who for so long twist their brains around, ‘I don’t know how I’ll get there, I guess I’ll have to start with some interns.’ Please will somebody take a gender or women or girls problem — just actually do it. Because if the City of Los Angeles can do that — for the first time we have a majority of women as our city’s 300 plus commissioners and board appointments and no all male boards — if we can do that in the first six months of this administration, you can do it in your c-suites, you can do it in your boards, you can do that where you work as well.”

Just a few days before the U.S. midterm elections, the focus of the Power Women Summit is to achieve gender equity in Hollywood, with the theme: The Road to 50/50 By 2020.

The Summit is the largest gathering ever assembled of the most influential women in entertainment and media, attended and supported by studios, news organizations and non-profits across the entertainment industry landscape. It is presented by the WrapWomen Foundation, a division of TheWrap News.

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