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2 September 2013updated 27 Sep 2015 3:55am

Does Aaron Sorkin have a woman problem?

In the space of three shows - Sports Night, Studio 60 and now The Newsroom - Aaron Sorkin's female television executives have gone from clever and competent to ditsy and childish. What's going on?

By sSarah Hughes

Does Aaron Sorkin have a women problem? In the early years of this century when The West Wing’s CJ Cregg was the poster girl for modern womankind such a question would have seemed unthinkable. But then came Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in which the two female leads were respectively “angry and incompetent” and “ditsy and repressed” and The Social Network, which ran into a storm of bad headlines about its negative depiction of women.

Sorkin vigorously refuted those claims, insisting that in The Social Network: “I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people.” In other words just because characters are sexist, don’t presume the writer is as well.

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