These days, Jenji Kohan is running the show as the creator of Orange Is The New Black. But in a New Yorker profile, Kohan revealed that she experienced a lot of sexism while starting out as a TV writer.
Kohan told the magazine that she originally applied for a TV writing job to prove her boyfriend wrong; he didn't believe she could get the job.
"He said I had more of a chance of getting into Congress than I did of writing for TV," Kohan told the New Yorker. She did prove him wrong, but she also experienced plenty of gender discrimination along the way.
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"She had her 'tit grabbed'; her name was taken off a script," writes the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum. "Once, when she was pregnant and about to have a job interview, her agent advised her to wear a big shirt and eat candy, so that the showrunner would think she was just fat."
Kohan also told the magazine that Garry Shandling, star of The Larry Sanders Show, "wasn't comfortable working with women," according to a conversation she had with her agent following a pitch meeting. "I was fired from everything," Kohan told Nussbaum.
During the span of her career, Kohan has written for Friends, Sex And The City, Gilmore Girls, Weeds, GLOW, and plenty of other shows. She's built an incredibly successful name for herself, despite the early setbacks. But it's frustrating to hear that people both in front of the camera and off camera gave her such a hard time, simply because she was a woman.
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