I can't make real-life workplaces safer and more fair for women just by showing them with briefcases or crossbows. But I can try to grant my characte… - Jane Espenson

I hope I am pigeonholed with comedy. I’m really not interested in writing the darker stuff, the emotional stuff.

I will not listen to childcare lectures from a man who put his daughter in a box and shipped her to Maine.

Today the percentage of female judges, college professors and detectives seen on television is a pretty good reflection of the actual world. (In the case of judges, I wouldn't be shocked to find out the number on television exceeds the number in real life — what is it about those black robes that makes us think ovaries?) But merely thrusting more women into more prestigious on-screen jobs doesn't necessarily make the working world a better place for women. If you were to show people images of two real-life professionals, one a man, one a woman, and ask them to rate their competence knowing nothing but job and gender — I bet people still give the guys the edge. It's not television's fault, exactly. But television can help fix the problem. Not by writing women into better professions, but by more accurately showing them as complex people contending with the sort of snide, generous, ambitious, incompetent, sad and hilarious co-workers who populate real workplaces.