Summary: A Seat At The Table

A Seat at the Table is a documentary depicting six ambitious young women from a very reputable high school interviewing accomplished women in various fields about their experiences with leadership. The documentary does a good job of trying to reach women of various races and diverse fields to discuss their struggles and success with leadership in a male dominated society that discourages women to be submissive and passive. However, the documentary spent a lot of time trying to gets the perspective of the high school women who were very privileged in terms to class to be able to afford a famous prep school like Miss Halls and this makes drawing broad and meaningful conclusions from the documentary severely hard. The purpose of the documentary and Kimmel’s writings is to discuss the systematic barriers that impede women’s academic and professional success and how women can (and have) overcome these obstacles. Some of the barriers that I noticed from the documentary and the text were both institutional and based on societal expectations. As Kimmel points out, many universities …show more content…
The essentialist argument is that women cannot speak up for the group because by nature they are passive. Women, therefore, have to challenge this assumption and change the perception that women can and do speak up and can lead a group towards success. Further, because now some of the institutional barriers are struck down, women tend to be incredibly self-conscious and self-critical. They need to prove themselves and always come out as successful. Since if they lose one, they somehow fit the stereotype that women are weak and cannot be an accomplished leader. This constant pressure that sometimes make women achieve less than their potential due to a constant fight against stereotype is called minority stress. This, according to me, is a major source of discouragement for women in leadership