Women, Gender, and the Financial Markets in Hollywood Films

Abstract

In Boiler Room (2000), a group of loud, young stockbrokers sit at a bar teasing and joking. One of the jokes is about a feminist submitting to the man: ‘why did the feminist cross the road? To suck my balls.’ This joke illustrates a popular belief that the financial industry is a male-dominated environment. In The Associate (1996), a middle-aged, old-fashioned secretary vents to an African American female executive that Wall Street is a sexist place. She says, ‘[t]he women’s movement, it didn’t make it to Wall Street.’ The executive replies by saying that her achievement is not a result of affirmative action, but of hard work and talent. The financial market is assumed to be a place where anyone — men and women, wealthy and poor — can succeed if one is hard-working, persistent, and money-minded. Given the two contradictory beliefs about the industry, we apply a feminist political economic perspective to analyze how the financial industry is represented in Hollywood films. This approach examines a gendered production, distribution, and consumption of goods and resources. It also critiques how ideology is used to stabilize the unbalanced power relation between the two genders (Lee 2011).