#5 Jane Espenson

Jane Espenson has been a writer and producer of many a television show; she wrote and produced episodes for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ellen, Battlestar Galactica,  Caprica, Torchwood, Husbands and Once Upon a Time.  At a lot of these shows she started out as a writer and was later promoted to producer or co-producer. When she started working as a writer she was often the only female in the writing room.

Jane also wrote essays for the Huffington Post about being a female writer, female characters and femininity. In the article 'On Sex and Writing (Not That Kind of Sex)' she actually spends the time to counter the argument that women are necessary to write about the female experience: man have been able to write female characters and women have been able to write male characters. This means that it is possible for good writers to cross the gender lines. The one fact is that sex should never make the list to not hire someone, male or female. If this would change, the number of female writers would change for the better. One of the interesting points she makes is the fact that we don't need to have women write female characters; we don't want female writers to be female character generators.

Jane addresses  the same problem as Linda Nochlin did all those years ago in her article 'Why have there been no great women artists':

"The problem lies not so much with some feminists' concept of what femininity is, but rather with their misconception-shared with the public at large-of what art is: with the naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms."

Although much has changed in the last decades, this believe that what an artist expresses matches their own believes still prevails. The introduction of Espenson's interview with the Advocate started with the sentence "Television writer Jane Espenson isn't gay, she just writes that way." It is amazing that we still can't accept the complexity of human beings and think in these binary oppositions. If she's a straight woman, how on earth could she make a show about two gay men? How can someone without the 'gay experience' empathize and understand these people?  It is time that we realize that we acknowledge what's important in art: talent. If we focus on that and try to leave things like sex of the creators, commercial values or any other restraints that we face now out if it, there will be more equality in the art world and there would be more freedom to create art. To create an atmosphere like that starts with having good female writers like Jane Espenson around and to quote Espenson again, strive to create "a staff that looks like the world: a balance of men and women, an emphasis in diversity of cultural background, racial makeup, and orientation, based on the idea that talent is evenly distributed among humanity."

Source

http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/television/2011/10/27/tv-mastermind-jane-espenson-ellen-buffy-evil-queens

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-espenson/women-tv-writers_b_1322537.html

http://www.janeespenson.com/

Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, Westview Press, 1988 by Linda Nochlin, pp.147-158