Recent Posts
Entertainment December 16, 2016
Gina Rodriguez believes that the future is female.
In partnership with Marie Claire, the “Jane the Virgin” star is producing and hosting the Young Women’s Honors ceremony, which seeks to commemorate the accomplishments of exemplary female scientists, lawmakers, athletes and more.
“I’ve always wanted to do work to uplift women, to put women in the forefront of the media and to really glorify other aspects of our society that aren’t just fame driven,” Rodriguez said in a recent interview.
The Young Women’s Honors will air on Dec. 19 as a special on the CW and will have all the glitz and glam of a typical Hollywood ceremony, including celebrity presenters like Katie Holmes, Hailee Steinfeld and Laverne Cox.
The honorees, however, will be outside of the entertainment industry. “They are the women that are going after a dream and making it a reality,” Rodriguez said. “They are women in science, in activism, in education, in art. What we’re going to do is use the platform we’ve been blessed with and showcase them.”
READ MORE: ‘Jane the Virgin’ Star Gina Rodriguez Reveals Her Alter Ego, ‘Cutz’
Among the honorees are physicist Sabrina Gonzales Pasterski, who engineered a single-engine airplane at 14, computer scientist Fereshteh Forough, who opened the first all-female coding school in Afghanistan and Simone Biles, a world and Olympic champion gymnast.
The Young Women’s Honors is the first project Rodriguez’s I Can and I Will Productions company will be tackling. When she first launched I Can and I Will she said that her goal was to produce films and TV shows that “help promote stories about diverse cultures and to put on screen what we see in real life.”
The actress, who recently received her third Golden Globe nomination for her role in “Jane the Virgin,” has spent her career seeking to expand the conversations people are having about women and the Latino community.
READ MORE: Why Gina Rodriguez Won’t Be Writing a Golden Globes Speech
According to the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity, Latinos have some of the least represented speaking roles on film and TV, despite the fact the community makes up about 14.4 percent of the U.S. population. And for those characters that do make it on screen, they’re often depicted as stereotypes.
“If the casting continues to portray a very singular look for Latinos, then that means women continue to be overly sexualized and [men] equally have to be the dominant, macho role,” says Felix Sánchez, co-founder of the National Hispanics Foundation for the Arts, in an NBC interview.
So Rodriguez consciously picks roles that progress the image of Latinos in the industry. “As a Latina growing up in Chicago, not seeing myself on screen, not seeing the Latino community personified in a positive light had an effect on me,” she explained.
The 32-year-old actress believes that media is a driving force in education today. Thus, she wants to use her platform to educate the next generation, to teach them they don’t have to be limited in the box that society puts them in.
READ MORE: Michelle Obama Celebrates ‘Hidden Figures’ and Calls For ‘Diversity at the Table’
“My goal in creating Young Women’s Honors is to generate positivity, inclusivity, unlimited potential and the possibility every woman is born with,” Rodriguez told Marie Claire. “As a young Latina, I had to break down barriers and overcome naysayers. When you see someone following their dreams, it gives you allowance to follow your own.”
