The 37-year-old actress walked the Golden Globes red carpet with Tarana Burke, the creator of the 'Me Too' movement.
Michelle Williams is doing all she can for the Time's Up initiative, because she wants her daughter to grow up in a world free of gender inequality.
ET's Kevin Frazier spoke with the 37-year-old actress at the Golden Globes on Sunday, where she walked the red carpet with Tarana Burke, the creator of the "Me Too" movement, and opened up about how she's working to make real change in Hollywood and beyond.
"I thought that I would have to raise my daughter to learn how to protect herself and defend herself against the world, and what I've realized is that it's actually possible [to change the world]," Williams said regarding her 12-year-old daughter, Matilda, whose father is the late actor Heath Ledger. "I believe it with all my heart that because of the work of women like Tarana, that we [can] hand our daughters a different world."
"I'm full of optimism and enthusiasm that we can make a change that will be permanent and lasting for all of our children," she added.
Walking the carpet with Burke as a sign of solidarity was important for both women.
"I had an idea, and I was able to get in touch with Tarana and we ended up on the phone for way longer and way into the night and it started from that. And it started with that willingness to say yes, that we work in different industries, but we can really work together because that's the only way," Williams explained. "I walked into my activism at the Women's March in D.C., and since then I have believed that we can make a difference and hopefully make a change."
"Tarana's been an activist for the last 20 years and it's possible for everyone at any time to say, 'I wanna make something a little bit better,' and I can be a part of that," she insisted.
"We're all women and we all have a vulnerability and we're all survivors in some kind of way. So I think it's more important to focus on where we're connected as opposed to where we're not connected," Burke added. "This work is so vast, it's gonna take everybody, people who work in Hollywood, and people who work in all kinds of different industries. It's gonna take all of us to come together to actually move the needle to end sexual violence."
"We felt as disempowered as any group of female workers... We felt frightened. We felt disempowered. We felt like we really didn't know how to stand up for ourselves," Williams explained of women in Hollywood. "Then we realized that this was a place where we had a platform, where if we had something else that we wanted to talk about, other than our dresses, we should try and do that. So tonight is our first night, and change, it's a long process."
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