International Women’s Day 2016: The women who challenged sexism on the red carpet

It's time to stop asking gendered questions

Cate Blanchett at the 20th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, where she picked up the award for Best Female Actor in a Leading Role (Reuters)

International Women’s Day, a day to celebrate the achievement of women and a day to highlight the importance of reaching gender parity, is fast approaching.

Women in the public eye are at once subjected to sexism and yet also provided with an important platform from which to challenge it, which they often do. Their refusal to answer sexist questions and conform to gender stereotypes within their work takes us closer to equality, and for that they should be celebrated.

Where better to tackle sexism than the place it still continues to thrive: the red carpet. By addressing or refusing to answer the gendered and all too familiar questions about fashion and appearance that often bypass men, these women highlighted how important it is to change the dialogue.

Emma Stone

Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield were jointly interviewed, but only Stone was asked about her hair colour, something Garfield noticed. “I don't get asked that,” he commented after, to which Stone explained: ”You get asked interesting, poignant questions because you are a boy.”

Cate Blanchett

The actress spotted the camera giving her the once over as she was interviewed on the SAG red carpet in 2014. Blanchett responded by peering into the camera lens and asking: “Do you do that to the guys?”

Elizabeth Moss

Moss took a more direct approach to tackling the E! Mini cam by covertly flipping her middle finger right at the camera.

Nicole Kidman

Fed up with gendered questions, the actress reportedly refused to answer Ryan Seacrest’s enquiry about what she was wearing and would only answer: “I don’t know what to say”.

Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman at the 2015 Evening Standard Theatre Awards (Getty)

Reese Witherspoon

Witherspoon approached red carpet sexism head on ahead of the 2015 Grammys by sharing the #askhermore hashtag, a movement urging journalists to ask women the same intelligent and thoughtful questions they ask men.

“This is a movement to say we’re more than just our dresses,” she said at the time. “There are 44 nominees this year that are women and we are so happy to be here and talk about the work that we’ve done. It’s hard being a woman in Hollywood, or any industry.”

Melissa McCarthy

The actress was approached by a reporter at the Toronto Film Festival who had written a particularly scathing piece about the film. In it, he also targeted McCarthy with suggestions she was only a “good actress” only when she looked attractive, so McCarthy enquired as to whether he’d dare say the same about a man.

His defence was even worse: “Well, you really looked bad.”

McCarthy gave this excellent response: “And I said, 'I hope you don't have a daughter,' and I didn't mean that in a mean way. I said, if she comes home and someone says she can't have a job because she’s unattractive, are you gonna say, 'That's right?' And he took that in his heart and he was like, 'No, I would never want that to happen. I would never in a million years want that to happen.'”

Scarlett Johansson

Of all the questions an interviewer could have asked Scarlett Johansson about her role in The Avengers, one felt compelled to ask what the actress was or wasn't wearing underneath her tight costume. “Were you able to wear...undergarments?”. “You're like the fifth person that's asked me that,” an unimpressed Johanson said, shaking her head in disbelief, as her co-star Jeremy Renner sat beside her.