On Friday, Meghan Markle continued her recent campaign raising awareness about representations of motherhood on TV with a SXSW panel appearance alongside Katie Couric and Brooke Shields. At one of the conference’s keynote panels called “Breaking Barriers, Shaping Narrative,” she presented findings from the Moms First and Geena Davis Institute study she funded alongside her husband, Prince Harry, through their Archewell Foundation, which was released this week. After going back and forth with Shields and Couric about what the media landscape was like before the advent of the internet, the duchess turned her attention to her own experiences of being the subject of social media attacks and learning about the atmosphere on platforms across the web.
“What I find the most disturbing, frankly—especially as a supporter of women—is how much of the hate is women completely spewing it to other women. I cannot make sense of that,” she said. “There are women at the highest level, the executive level, who are great champions of women and great philanthropists, working in these spaces, yet they’re allowing this kind of behavior to run rampant. At a certain point, they have got to put the Dos behind the Says and really make some changes on a systemic level.”
She added that consumers should also take responsibility for what they support. “The systemic change has to happen at the same time as the cultural change is happening,” she said. “If you’re reading something terrible about a woman, why are you sharing it with your friends? Why are you choosing to put that out in the world? What if it was your friend or your mom or your daughter? You wouldn’t do it.”
The panel, which was hosted by Errin Hayes, editor-at-large for The 19th News, also featured Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociologist and DEI consultant, who reflected on the Archewell-funded data and mentioned other studies about how representations of women can affect the opinions of policymakers. In gray striped silk separates, Meghan also spoke about the work that she and Harry had done to address the impact of social media on teenagers, including meeting with parents who had seen its effects on their own children.
Couric, who spoke about her experiences as a woman in journalism, asked the duchess to share her familiar story about the time she protested a sexist soap commercial at the age of 11. Meghan told the story, and reflected on the lessons she learned. “It’s funny to look back at it now because that was before social media where you had a reach that was so much greater. It was just an 11-year-old with a pen and paper,” she said. “But I guess goes to show that if you know that there’s something wrong and you’re using your voice to advocate in the direction of what is right, that can really land and resonate.”
In response to Meghan’s story, Shields responded with a bit of dark comedy about her role in the 1977 Louis Malle film Pretty Baby, set in a 1910s brothel. “This is one of the ways we’re different. When I was 11, I was playing a prostitute,” she said. “I would’ve been writing very different letters, but equally important, I hope.” Shields went on to talk about the documentary she appeared in, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, and how it helped remind her of the lessons she learned from the media representations of women. “Hollywood is predicated on eating its young. That’s what it wants to do. It wants to build you up and then devour you. From a very early age, I learned the importance of education, and I knew that if I went to university, they couldn’t take that away from me.”