Brie Larson is best known at the moment for portraying Captain Marvel in the upcoming superhero movie (out next month on International Women’s Day), but she’s also set to portray a real-life hero in a movie highlighting gender discrimination in entrepreneurship. Click through to read more about women entrepreneurs at the center of the story, their company, the discrimination they faced, and Larson’s involvement in the project.
By Saqib Shah
Brie Larson is set to star in a Netflix movie that highlights startup sexism as part of a two-film deal with the streaming service. Lady Business is based on a Fast Company article about two female entrepreneurs who invented a fake male cofounder in order to be taken seriously in the patriarchal business world.
Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer spoke of how they’d faced condescension from male developers when launching their weird art e-commerce site ‘Witchsy.” But that all changed when the fictional “Keith Mann” was magicked into existence. “It was like night and day,” Dwyer told Fast Company in 2017. “It would take me days to get a response, but Keith could not only get a response and a status update, but also be asked if he wanted anything else or if there was anything else that Keith needed help with.”
Fast forward to today, and Silicon Valley is still grappling with gender discrimination and harassment issues. In 2018, Google employees forced the tech giant to update its sexual misconduct policies after staging mass protests. And Uber agreed to pay 56 employees a total of $1.9 million for harassment claims.
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Image credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
