The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements — which started as an opportunity for women to speak out against shocking revelations of abuse in the workforce by men in power — have evolved into a clear mandate for better treatment and opportunities for women in across all business sectors, especially in the entertainment industry.

Read More: #MeToo: A Moment or a Movement?|Some On-the-Job Gender Training

In just the last few weeks, women have achieved a number of milestones have in front of and behind the camera:

• NBC in mid-January hired Libby Leist as its executive producer at Today, making her the first woman to lead the broadcast network’s morning show, which was rocked in November by the firing of popular host Matt Lauer amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences nominated a record number of women actresses, writers, directors and producers for Oscars in 2018. The official tally of 40 nominated women — tying 2016’s record — includes the first woman to receive a nomination for cinematography, Rachel Morrison for Mudbound.

• And, in a touch of irony, Variety has reported that Maria Contreras-Sweet, the Small Business Administrator under President Barack Obama, has the inside track on purchasing the beleaguered The Weinstein Co. production outfit, once headed by Harvey Weinstein, ousted on accusations of sexual misconduct. If she succeeds in purchasing the company, it would be led by a board with a majority of women.

“We’re experiencing a sea change — women and minorities are not interested in putting up with being in second place anymore,” Step Up: High Water creator Holly Sorensen told Multichannel News. “It’s as combination of Hollywood being willing and seeing the value of these stories both creatively and financially.”

A Movement in the Spotlight
Indeed, the movement toward greater representation and respect for women in Hollywood has taken root on entertainment’s biggest stages, from Oprah Winfrey’s inspirational and impassioned speech supporting those who have bravely spoken up against sexual abuse at the recent Golden Globe Awards — along with the symbolic black-dress protest at the event — to the all-woman lineup of presenters at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Even the biannual Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour was heavily influenced by the #MeToo movement as female actresses, directors and writers spoke eloquently about the need for a change in how business is conducted, particularly in light of the fact that only 28% of the current producers, directors and editors of scripted shows are women, according to Lifetime executive vice president and head of programming Liz Gateley.

The #MeToo movement will only be effective if it creates permanent change, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, co-creator of Lifetime’s scripted series UnReal, said during the network’s TCA panel.

“What I want at the end of this ‘hashtag-MeToo’ moment is so much more than just a safe working environment for myself and for my colleagues,” she said. “ What I want is to get our shows on the air and to get rid of the assumption that female-created or run shows are going to be, quote-unquote, soft, and to get rid of the insistence that the female characters be, quote-unquote, likable … and also to get rid of the idea that you need a man above you or with you to run the show, because the woman is going to be too emotional or inexperienced, or any of the other stereotypes that are out there.”

Digital service YouTube has already committed to content that features women and minorities in front of and behind the camera, president Susanne Daniels told Multichannel News, with women producers behind YouTube Red’s original series Step Up!: High Water and Youth and Consequences. Programmers need to move away from hiring white men as showrunners if they are going to affect true change within the industry, she said.

“There are a lot more experienced white male directors in the category than are anyone else, so if you don’t make the effort it feels safer to go in that direction,” she said. “Working with someone else other than a white male director requires taking a chance and a risk because there aren’t as many options. The industry has to push from every end — we have to push from our end as executives, but we have to work with producers, studios and production teams that are willing to push from their end.”

Shows That Speak to the Moment
The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have also spurred several creative projects on various networks. PBS has commissioned #MeToo, Now What?, a five-part series that will look to take the discussion regarding sexual harassment in the workplace to another level and to examine how the movement can be used to effect positive and lasting change.

Starz last Friday (Jan. 26) debuted #Thatsharrasment, a David Schwimmer-produced series of short films depicting real-life cases of workplace sexual harassment created in conjunction with The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network and the National Women’s Law Center.

On Tuesday (Jan. 30) E! will debut Citizen Rose, a documentary series that follows actress/producer Rose McGowan, whose initial accusations against Harvey Weinstein helped spark the #MeToo movement.

The movements signify an awakening to what’s been happening in the industry for some time, as well as the need to change the negative paradigm that exists in companies all over the world, McGowan said at E!’s TCA session. “I think it is a time of reckoning and a reset button,” McGowan said.

Added Citizen Rose executive producer Andrea Metz: “This is a global problem … what this message is about is that women don’t have to sit in silence any longer and sit in fear,” she said. “Rose has been brave enough to come forward, and I think we’re just going to see the messaging continue, and the conversation continue. And that’s what’s so important.”

The Directors Guild of America reported Tuesday that the number of minority and female directors increased during the 2016-17 television season.

According to the DGA 2016-17 Episodic TV Director Diversity Report, the percentage of episodes directed by ethnic minorities rose by 3 points to a record 22% of all episodes, while the share of episodes directed by women jumped 4 points to an all-time high of 21% of all episodes.

The increases comes as more content is being produced across the board. During the 2016-17 season more than 4,482 episodes were produced, an increase of 10% in total episodes compared with the 2015-16 season, and a 42% increase compared with five years ago, according to the report.

Related: New York Backs TV Production Tax Break for Hiring Diverse Writers, Directors

Among studios producing content, Twentieth Century Fox Cos. was the most diverse among the top 10 largest studios, with 45% of its content directed by women and minorities, the DGA found. Netflix finished 10th with only 20.5% of its shows helmed by a minority or female director.

"While this report, and our recent report on hiring of first-time TV directors, reflect some progress overall, there are stark disparities among the major studios that raise questions about how committed to inclusion some employers really are," said DGA president Thomas Schlamme. "We want to make sure that every talented individual has an equal shot, and a path forward. But for that to happen, employers must expand their hiring processes to discover the world of capable directors hiding in plain sight. Frankly, it’s hard to understand why they're not doing more. Even if all the right reasons are not enough for them, they should at least be motivated by the bottom line – inclusion just makes good business sense."

I‘ve wanted to be a storyteller for as long as I can remember.  As a little girl in Iowa, long after I was supposed to be asleep, I would read mysteries and adventure stories with a flashlight under the covers.  Books transported me to places I’d never even heard of and the characters I met inspired me to travel and ultimately tell stories of my own. 

My professional storytelling career began as a news reporter and anchor at WCCO-TV, the CBS O&O in Minneapolis. Thanks to the station’s commitment to global news, I was sent to cover news in Africa, Central and South America, Europe and even to live for three weeks with former headhunters in Papua New Guinea.  But after 17 years in broadcast journalism and with three young children at home, I felt something was missing. I wanted to tell stories that were more than a minute and a half long.  And after so many years of focusing often on what was wrong with the world, I wanted to feature people with the passion and audacity to make things better.

Tremendous! Entertainment was born from a desire to tell stories that elevate the human spirit.  With Jane E. Durkee, chief operating officer, and Shannon Keenan Demers, senior vice president of production and creative, at my side as “the matriarchs” of the TEI family, we’ve been able to do just that for almost 20 years. 

Many have debated whether women make better leaders than men and studies first published in the Harvard Business Review certainly give women the nod.  In my experience, women excel at driving results, but they also tend to be more collaborative, more empowering and more likely to spot opportunities that mere analytics miss. This heart-led filter not only generates content that inspires and entertains, it creates a company-wide culture that retains the most talented women and men and ultimately leads to financial success. 

Take Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern (pictured), a franchise we created in the early 2000s that is now Travel Channel’s longest-running series still in premieres. The series explores cultures around the world through the lens of food, and it celebrates the ordinary, yet extraordinary lives of people who may look different but who exemplify ideals we all value.   True, eating blood pudding or sautéed rat may seem foreign to most Americans, but early on when Andrew discovered a tribe that was willing to offer up its only meal in three days to him or a man who happily risked his life at sea with nothing more than a ball of string and a rusty knife so he could feed his family, we knew we were on to something special -- something that viewers would respond to.  

And when it comes to giving women a voice, you don’t often think of the Middle East as a place where women are in leadership positions or own their own businesses, but when we were researching Dubai for Bizarre Foods, our supervising producer, Tammy Bloom, was pleasantly surprised to discover a woman who owns a camel farm and employs mostly men. She also found two women who started a global gourmet food company, a woman executive at a thriving camel dairy and a young women entrepreneur with a successful food and travel business.  Suffice it to say, we made it a point to feature all these stories in our Dubai episode.

Whether it’s ghost hunters who want to save lost souls, a band director in the Deep South who builds character above all else or two buddies who inspire a new generation to explore nature, Tremendous! Entertainment seeks out ordinary people doing extraordinary things because we know that characters who are loud and passionate about making the world a better place ultimately speak to all of us. 

And when you treat co-workers like family, allow them to express their creativity and give them the flexibility to spend time with their loved ones, you find engaged and talented people who are committed to their work and willing to go that extra mile. 

That heart-led filter, coupled with our Midwestern roots, ultimately influenced our motto, “Where Character Matters.” Those three words inform our work on screen and behind the scenes. When everyone believes in the mission and feels good about what they are producing, it shows on the bottom line and helps fulfill the dreams of an Iowa-born storyteller.

Colleen Needles Steward is president and CEO of factual-based entertainment company Tremendous! Entertainment in Minneapolis.  

Newsweek's current coverstory "What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women" reaffirms the chasm of high tech's gender scandal. 

The most positive part of the article involves the lengthy insights from two entrepreneurs who foundedGlassbreakers, a peer-mentoring community for profession women.  My bias is that one of the founders is the daughter of long-time colleagues; the parents themselves have been digital pioneers working in and around the media, technology and education sectors for more than three decades. The profile never mentions platitudes about "you can do anything a guy can do" when it comes to technology.

That's a given.

The Newsweek report about high-tech sexism, while not breaking new ground, is timely in the context of two media/telecom conference in Washington during the past week.  At both the Multicultural Media Telecommunications and Internet Council's (MMTC)program and the State of the Net (SOTN) annual idea-fest, gender issues were front and center, along with other diversity discussions.

It's always a good time to recognize the value of developing talent from all backgrounds. That perception is clearly lost in many tech enterprises, as Newsweek's recitations about frat-boy sexism in Silicon Valley reinforces.

Cable has substantially skirted (sorry) the issue - especially on the programming side - thanks to an anomaly of  1980s corporate culture.  As cable was entering its growth-burst/mainstream era, it sought to recruit seasoned executives from adjacent industries such as broadcasting and telephone companies. Even in the midst of the Bell System break-up, many telco lifers wouldn't jump; broadcaster gents didn't see a reason to abandon their "license-to-print-money" sinecure at networks or stations.  As a result, many women (not just Kay Koplovitz) plunged into cable and subsequently nurtured other female executives. Yes, as many friends point out, they did it by entrepreneuring or by settling for 70% wages.

One "star" who appeared on both the MMTC and SOTN agendas was Kimberly Bryant, founder ofBlack Girls Code,  a four-year-old national  non-profit organization dedicated to teaching girls ages 7-17 about computer programming and digital technology.  Bryant showed by example the great pool of talent that can be developed for tech jobs at all levels.

(Tangentially but very pertinently: this week has seen a bubbling of interest for an in-production documentary about  Grace Hopper, the computer scientist who led many federal computer breakthroughs."Born with Curiosity" is being crowd-funded on Indiegogo; let's hope that a visionary cable network picks it up and promotes it as a further reminder that women can do tech very, very well.)

At  MMTC's Sixth Annual Broadband and Social Justice Summit, many of the discussions moved beyond the traditional issues of African-American/Hispanic/Asian roles in broadcasting and broadband ownership and operations.  The substantial number of successful female executives (albeit more in marketing, management and operations than in technology) underscored the gender issue, although many of the women testified to the challenges they faced in building their careers.   

At the SOTN annual conference, run by the Internet Education Foundation, all of the morning keynoters were female - partially a fluke because the only male (a Congressman) scheduled for the program was snowed out that morning.  In this case, the speakers - a congresswoman and federal agency leaders (including the FCC's Jessica Rosenworcel and FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez) - primarily brought their  political credentials; but clearly all of the women have extensive  geek savvy.  Megan Smith, the country's Chief Technology Officer, showed off both her technology and policy credentials as well as vision.

As media and telecom industries rely on greater technology - and as the cable business increases its relationships with Silicon Valley - it's a good time to reaffirm and assert the value of all skilled talent. It's a message that the cable industry can convey to the high-flying frat boys who think they call all the Internet-era shots. And it's worth remembering within the diversifying cable business itself.

Skills can be nurtured and hired, whether or not a Y chromosomes is involved.

Gary Arlen follows media/telecom and technology policy at Arlen Communications.