Amidst all the strangeness and bad work going on with the British royal family, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle continue to build their life away from (official) royalty.
After ending their Spotify deal last year, Duchess Meghan has signed on to produce podcasts with Lemonada Media, a women-centric business and platform that hosts shows by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jennette McCurdy, and Elyse Myers, among others. Then there’s the Invictus Games coming up this summer—the centerpiece of Harry & Meghan’s public life, so far. But they’ve also set themselves up as philanthropists, so let’s see how one of those donations is working out.
Through their Archewell Foundation, Harry and Meghan funded a study of representation of mothers on television, with a sample drawn from shows aired in 2022. The study was produced by Moms F1rst and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and it what it found is frankly not shocking—most of the time the family breadwinner is the dad, the realities of childcare and housework are largely invisible, and despite slight increases in diverse representation, TV moms remain overwhelmingly white, young, and thin. You can read the results of the study here.
The stat that leapt out at me is the one about housekeeping. It was completely normal in Nineties sitcoms (and earlier, but I was watching sitcoms in the Nineties) to see people doing housework on camera. I seem to remember the mom on Home Improvement always folding baskets of laundry. Brett Butler’s house on Grace Under Fire was messy, so was the Conner home on Roseanne. It’s not like it was the central thing—although occasionally, accomplishing domestic tasks could make up the A plot, especially on shows that revolved around domestic workers, like The Nanny—but it wasn’t strange to see people, usually women, carrying out domestic tasks while on screen. Now? All that sh-t is off camera.
In its earlier eras, television life was relational, in the Nineties, shows like Friends and Sex and the City flipped the switch to aspirational, and we’ve never looked back. Every home is immaculate, no child ever needs immediate supervision, no matter how small. Even a domestic sitcom about families like Modern Family depicts an upper-middle class lifestyle with typically spotless homes and children who raise themselves while their parents gallivant through a delayed adolescence. It’s escapism! I know that! The shift to aspirational lifestyles on TV coincides with growing wealth inequality, prolonged wage stagnation, and the Great Recession of the 2000s. Life got frustrating and hard, and people wanted TV shows to make them laugh and dream of gleaming quartz countertops that don’t stain.
The elimination of domestic work from TV shows goes along with that. Obviously, there are exceptions, like Maid, which is explicitly about a domestic worker struggling on the lower end of the income scale. But I was not at all surprised by the stat about depictions of housework, though I think that continuing to portray women as the primary domestic caregiver while also limiting SEEING that work occur is doubly harmful. For one thing, it creates an unrealistic expectation of “having it all”, or maybe, “managing it all”, that a woman can have a job, a safe and sound child, and an immaculate home effortlessly.
In a statement about the release of the report, Meghan said, “My past experience as an actress, and now today as a producer and mother, have amplified my belief in the critical importance of supporting women and moms both behind the lens and in front of it. This report about the portrayal of mothers in entertainment highlights the gaps we need to fill to achieve true representation in the content we create and consume, and I’m honored to support this work through the Archewell Foundation.”
The report includes recommendations to executives and producers to create employment policies that better support working parents, and to writers to depict motherhood more realistically, based on the actual challenges mothers face, and to “view moms through an intersectional lens”. Will anyone reflect on these statistics and recommendations and implement meaningful change? Probably not. It feels like we’re in a moment of rolling back whatever intersectional and representational gains were made in film and television over the last few years.
And I’m not sure there’s a “fix” for the audience’s desire for aspirational living. It’s been like, 30 years and people still want shows full of real estate and architecture porn and now everyone’s obsessed with “quiet luxury”, so I don’t see it changing any time soon. But it is beneficial to have it codified, to be able to point to a reputable study and show the trend, it’s valuable evidence, if nothing else.
I’m too cynical to think one study will change anything, but whatever else is going on with their business and their family, Harry and Meghan continue to put their money where their mouths are, highlighting the issues important to them. I have found their post-royal work to be inconsistent, but things like this study are a reminder they can be effective just by granting money to various foundations and causes. They don’t have to lead every project themselves. After their first few years on their own, I am cautiously optimistic they’re finding a balance that works, between their centerpiece causes like Invictus, and the kind of philanthropic giving that can define their presence on the world stage beyond castles and tiaras.
