Meryl Streep has been active in the fight for gender equality both onscreen and off: Embodying Emmeline Pankhurst in forthcoming voting rights drama “Suffragette," lobbying Congress to pass an equal rights amendment, and funding a screenwriting lab for female writers over 40 (not to mention the finger point to end all finger points during Patricia Arquette's wage gap-decrying oscar speech).
And in a new interview with Time Out, Streep had some wise words about how she would deal with the problem of sexism in the entertainment industry.
"Men should look at the world as if something is wrong when their voices predominate. They should feel it,” Streep explained. "People at agencies and studios, including the parent boards, might look around the table at the decision-making level and feel something is wrong if half their participants are not women. Because our tastes are different, what we value is different. Not better, different.’
It’s ironic, then, that Streep refuses to identify as a feminist later on in the Q&A — as she says "I am a humanist, I am for nice easy balance” — given the strong feminist sentiments she expresses throughout the piece. While many actresses have shied away from using that fraught F-word (like Marion Cotillard, who recently said she "[doesn't] qualify [herself] as a feminist,") it does seem as though Streep is walking the walk and putting her influence behind feminist ideals.
Read the full Q&A over at Time Out, which covers her frustration with being asked about playing a strong woman ("No man is ever asked: 'You often play very strong men. Why?’") to namechecking Malala Yousafzai and her classmates as sources of inspiration.
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