Reality Television

A reality show that my family enjoys watching here and there is called "Shark Tank". The show first ran in 2009 on ABC and is still in production today. Aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of judges who will then choose whether they want to invest. One of the judges is Barbara Corcoran, co-founder of a real estate business called The Corcoran Group. As the only female "shark", Barbara's gender is highlighted by the contrast of her behavior and the male judges' behavior as well as the comments directed towards her by the male judges. While the male sharks are brutally honest when critiquing the weaknesses or flaws in business plans and usually do not display patience or understanding, Barbara tends to try to be softer in her criticisms and in telling entrepreneurs that she will not be investing. The male judges tend to make jokes involving gendered stereotypes although Barbara herself has short hair and is not overtly feminine in appearance.



Just this fall, another female judge joined Barbara on the panel, and Barbara seemed to be very pleased about that. The following quote is from an interview with USA Today:

"I've been asking them to put two women on the set since the beginning," says Corcoran, who believes "the key that turned the lock was the tremendous amount of pressure they felt from viewers at home," which she stoked in countless speeches to groups of women who'd asked the same question.

It is clear from this quote that previously there had been a feeling of male hegemony on the show both on the panel as well as amongst the entrepreneurs. The following quote is from the same article in USA Today (Lori Greiner, "QVC queen", is the judge who joined Barbara this fall):

And both believe female sharks have "a better perspective on practical real-life things," Greiner says, "because they're the ones that do a lot of the purchasing for the home. They think three steps ahead."

From the episodes I have watched I can tell that Barbara is a very strong woman who will put up a fight if she has to, but I would agree that it probably has been even more difficult to trump the "woman" perspective now that two confident women are on the panel simultaneously. 

On an interesting side note, Barbara wrote a book entitled If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails: And Other Lessons I Learned from My Mom. Without knowing anything about the book, it is clear that Barbara has had experiences related to feminine stereotypes and body image. As a successful executive in a male-dominated field, Barbara has found that her gender plays a large role in how others treat her. In "Is TV for Real?" Janice Peck's analysis on Oprah's enterprise is discussed in addition to "the global impact that [her] key message of self-empowerment (especially for women) has had". In my opinion, Barbara Corcoran conveys a similar message of self-empowerment to women of humble beginnings like herself to not be intimidated to work their way up to the top of male-dominated professions.