Post by The Big Daddy C-Master on Feb 23, 2015 16:07:45 GMT -5
Women earn less than men in Hollywood and get less lead roles. Is this sexism?
www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/03/11/will-hollywoods-depressing-treatment-of-women-ever-change/
It’s the time of year when a host of organizations release their findings about how the movie industry treats women both behind the camera and in front of it, and as usual, the results are depressing.
Martha Lauzen, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, published the latest of her “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World” studies today, and the results are typically dismal. Of the 100 top-grossing movies of 2013, women made up just 15 percent of main characters. 73 percent of all female characters are white–as Lauzen wrote in the report, “Moviegoers were as likely to see an other-worldly female as they were to see an Asian female character.” Female characters are younger than their male counterparts, too. 54 percent of female characters are under 40, while 58 percent of male characters were in their thirties and forties. And on screen, women work less than men. 78 percent of male characters have jobs, while just 60 percent of female characters do.
It’s easy to despair at an industry that treats women like we’re invisible, and is willing to tell some of our stories only when we’re young, hot, white, and underemployed. But rather than being stunned into submission year after year by these figures, I asked Lauzen and Stacy Smith, the director of the Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism where these figures come from — and whether there’s any prospect of changing them.
Lauzen and Smith agreed that one of the culprits driving down the number of female characters is simple, supposedly benign advice given to creative writers of all kinds: Write what you know. That’s meant to be an injunction that guides writers towards authentic insights drawn from life and research, and away from stiff, mawkish attempts to conjure up worlds and characters without having thought carefully about them first. But this maxim, while wise in its particulars, can end up discouraging writers from reaching beyond their experiences.
“Having lived their lives as males, men tend to create male characters,” Lauzen says. “Having lived their lives as females, women tend to create female characters. Of course, there are exceptions.” As a result, Smith explains, the dominance of male writers — they write about 85 percent of movies, according to her research — produces a predictable result. “It should not be any surprise that they are telling dynamic, engaging stories about men,” Smith says.
Certain trends in the treatment of female characters also tend to reinforce each other in negative ways. Lauzen found that there’s an age gap in movies: Female characters are predominantly in their twenties or thirties, while male characters are frequently in their thirties or forties.
“Favoring female characters in their twenties and thirties has some interesting consequences for the amount of personal and professional power a character is likely to wield,” she explains. “When writers and filmmakers keep female characters young, they also limit the amount of (believable) power that character is likely to possess. I think we have to recognize that our culture is currently grappling with how to react to powerful females, in real life and in film.”
Similarly, Smith notes that the occupations of characters who appear on screen may drive down gender diversity.
“Many of those,” particularly among supporting or background characters, Smith explains, “are defined by a particular occupation—like law enforcement, military, or politics. Occupational stereotypes that fall along gendered lines may be informing whether these characters are written as males or females.” In other words, if you have a cop make a fleeting appearance, or have your characters walk through a military base, it may not occur to writers and directors to think about the gender mix. Instead, they’ll simply default to putting men in those roles.
There are some promising signs, however. When Smith and her colleagues studied the box office results for movies released in 2007, they found a small, but not statistically significant negative relationship between whether a movie had a female lead and its American box office. But overseas, a female lead could drive box office in a positive direction.
Smith is cautious about her conclusions, noting that they’d need more years of data to say for sure that female leads are a consistent draw overseas. And she told me “It should be noted that gender of the lead character was less important than other factors such as production budgets, distribution density and story strength.”
But this seems like a promising line of inquiry. Disney’s animated fairy tale “Frozen” became the first movie directed by a woman to bring more than $1 billion, in part because of strong international ticket sales. The audience for “The Hunger Games” franchise, about a young woman fighting against a dictatorial government in a post-apocalyptic America, rose internationally from the first movie to the second, even as the domestic box office stayed relatively consistent. “The Hunger Games” sold $276.5 million worth of tickets internationally: the sequel, “Catching Fire” raked in $433 million. Similarly, over the course of the “Twilight” franchise’s run, the international box office for those films rose from $397.9 million for the first installment to $832.6 million for the last.
Smith and her colleagues have another study on the performance of female characters coming out this fall. If their initial findings, that female characters can produce better financial results for a movie abroad, are born out in this new set of data, that would be a radical challenge to Hollywood’s assumptions what works and what doesn’t.
And that challenge would come at a time when the international markets are critically important to what gets greenlit and what doesn’t. As the producer Lynda Obst wrote in her recent book Sleepless In Hollywood, “International has come to be 70 percent of our total revenues in the New Abnormal. When I began in the Old Abnormal it was 20 percent.” The initial rush to satisfy that audience has meant an uptick of superhero movies and projects like Guillermo del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” (an homage to Japanese kaiju, or “strange creature” movies). But if it turns out international audiences crave female leads, the repercussions could be enormous.
Some studios have started focusing more on female leads of their own initiative. Lionsgate, where Nina Jacobson produces “The Hunger Games” franchise, has been a first mover. Smith’s analysis of the top 100-grossing movies in 2012 found that the speaking characters in Lionsgate movies were 42.8 percent female. Lionsgate had hits across multiple genres — in addition to “The Hunger Games” and the final “Twilight” film, the studio scored hits with Tyler Perry’s “Madea’s Witness Protection,” Joss Whedon’s horror riff “The Cabin In The Woods,” and ensemble romcom “What To Expect When You’re Expecting.” The studio’s performance is a sharp contrast to Lauzen’s figures from the top-grossing movies of 2013, where overall, just 30 percent of characters who speak on screen were female.
The success of one studio may not turn around the entire industry. And Lionsgate’s dedication to female characters may have a time limit.
“When you’re talking about thousands and thousands of characters, small trends are not likely to move the numbers significantly in one direction or another,” Lauzen warns. “Overall, the film industry is experiencing gender inertia both on screen and behind the scenes.”
But Smith hopes that the industry will someday see the light generated by flashing dollar signs. “If females represent 50 percent of the population and buy 50 percent of the tickets, it is just good business to include them on screen,” she says. The next several years could show us just how big those dollar signs have to be, and how brightly they have to shine, for Hollywood to change.
mashable.com/2014/08/05/female-superhero-hollywood-spider-man/
LOS ANGELES — The Hollywood diversity discussion has reached the point of supersaturation online: Not a scrap of movie or TV news escapes the boiling rage of fans, bloggers — even filmmakers — who are fed up with the indisputable fact that women and minorities are heinously underrepresented here.
These voices are passionate, they are persistent and they are armed with depressing statistics, like the fact that less than one-third of speaking characters in today's top movies are played by women, or that women directed 1.9% of those films. And it's not getting better.
SEE ALSO: 19 Kickass Lady Superheroes You Should Know More About
Plenty of fuel for the firestorm has surfaced over the past few weeks, most recently on Monday, when someone high up at Sony Pictures Entertainment whispered to Deadline.com that the studio is developing a “female-led” superhero film from its Spider-Man universe. It was a calculated leak, meant to steal a bit of Marvel’s thunder as its parent company Disney was celebrating a record $94 million for Guardians of the Galaxy.
gamora
A scene from Marvel/Disney's "Guardians of the Galaxy."
IMAGE: MARVEL/DISNEY
It was also frustratingly half-assed — an appeal to the outraged without an actual commitment.
The studio, according to the report, is "eyeing" a 2017 release date, but hadn't sorted out which female character it would develop, and that’s largely because Sony doesn't have a bankable one in its stable. While DC has Wonder Woman and Marvel has dozens of marginally recognizable female characters, the Spider-Man “universe” is hardscrabble, particularly with regard to females. Black Cat? Spider-Woman?
But Sony's goal was met: While Disney/Marvel and Warner Bros./DC continue to hem and haw about developing bankable leading super-ladies, Sony swoops in and looks, for a moment, like the progressive one.
"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" New York Premiere - Outside Arrivals
Felicity Jones is rumored to be Black Cat in upcoming "Amazing Spider-Man" films and spinoffs.
IMAGE: JIM SPELLMAN/WIREIMAGE
It was empty and opportunistic, but it was welcomed. Why? Because this problem has festered too long, and the rabble is out of patience.
Sony was already caught crossing the gender streams when it was reported over the weekend that the studio was kicking around a Ghostbusters reboot with an all-female ensemble and Bridesmaids writer/director Paul Feig on its wish-list. He may do it — he more likely may not — but the whole thing stirred up a huge flame war between Deadline writer Mike Fleming and his own colleague, Anita Busch, a debate that played out on their own site.
But the truth is, Sony's overtures were just the cherry on top of a huge gender-role sundae that the Hollywood press has been scooping out for weeks. So many other stories have inflamed this already sore subject, including, but not limited to:
THOR 001_cover
Marvel comics’ announcement that Thor will be a woman. Yes, many actually cried foul on this one, the argument being that it's a temporary and thereby patronizing move, just a woman inhabiting a man’s role instead of the meaningful development of a female character.
Marvel comics’ announcement that Samuel “The Falcon” Wilson, who is black, would take on the Captain America role (apply above logic).
Lucy easily beating Hercules in a head-to-head box office brawl had many wagging their fingers that Hollywood is out of touch with what audiences really want.
The apparent obliteration of founding Avenger Janet “The Wasp” van Dyne from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by way of Ant-Man.
The apparent obliteration of Dorne heir Arianna Martell from the Game of Thrones cast on HBO.
The True Detective Season 2 cast mystery: After a season of white-male psyche, which was great, we've been promised a stronger female presence, including a three-lead ensemble that may include, you know, a woman.
And the ongoing controversy about the cast of the Star Wars: Episode VII, which garnered howls when it started out being heavily male-dominated. The project has since added enough women — six females among the 20 characters announced so far — to bring it almost exactly in line with the less-than-30% figure we see across the industry.
Daisy-Ridley
Daisy Ridley is the only "unknown" in the new "Star Wars" cast.
IMAGE: IMDB
The 30% figure (also referenced in the beginning of this story) comes from a study by the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, which every year surveys film and TV to divine the gender curve. The study is funded by the school and supporters of its Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, and the results are not promising — in particular because the discrepancies are deep, abiding and showing no signs of improvement.
In some cases, they are getting worse.
The biggest disconnect actually lies not with women, but with Hispanics, who make up nearly 17% of the U.S. population and buy roughly 25% of all movie tickets sold annually in the U.S. Yet only 4.9% of speaking characters in the top 100 films are Latino.
“Hispanics clearly are the most underserved racial/ethnic group by the film industry,” is the conclusion of a separate study by Annenberg, also published recently.
Hollywood may have a built-in excuse here, that the Hispanic population has been exploding in recent years — maybe they’re just catching up.
But as for women? Well, they’ve been around awhile now.
Annenberg reviewed a total of 4,506 speaking parts from the top 100 grossing films of 2013 to determine what this story has already referenced — that a mere 29.2% of those characters were played by women. That was lower than previous results from 2007 (29.9%), 2008 (32.8%), 2009 (32.8%) and 2010 (30.3%).
There are other slices of 2013 data that should make your blood boil, no matter what combination of chromosomes it carries: Of the top 100 films, 28% had a female lead or co-lead. Only 2% percent featured more female characters than males. Two percent. Of the top 100 films, 28% had a female lead or co-lead. Only 2% percent featured more female characters than males. Two percent.
It’s certainly no better behind the camera: “Out of 1,374 directors, writers, and producers credited across the sample, less than a fifth (15.9%) of these content creators were women. This calculates into a gender ratio of 5.3 male filmmakers to every 1 female,” the study found.
The most frustrating and confounding aspect of all of this is: What’s to be done? Because waiting around for things to get better does not seem to be an option.
“The prevalence of female speaking characters in film has … remained stable for decades,” reads the study’s conclusion. “Given the wealth of research on the topic, the lack of female characters does not appear to be a problem that will self‐correct over time.”
However, the study puts the impetus on “decision-makers and filmmakers” to “match the demography of their creative constructions to that of the individuals filling the seats at movie theaters.” Which, if you know anything about how people break into and then rise in Hollywood … sounds an awful lot like “Waiting around for things to get better.”
There are some out-in-the-open efforts here, in particular at its trade publications, to draw attention to the efforts of women in prominent roles. The Hollywood Reporter publishes an annual “women’s issue.” Variety and TheWrap host annual “power women” events that draw big names to their luncheons and red carpets. But at their core, these events are sponsorship opportunities, part of an events cottage industry that adds to the publications’ bottom lines.
Women Who Kick Ass
Katey Sagal, Sarah Paulson, Tatiana Maslany, Nicole Beharie, and Maisie Williams at the 2014 Comic-Con "Women Who Kick Ass" panel.
IMAGE: KEVIN WINTER
Comic-Con has hosted a “Women Who Kick Ass” panel two years running, an event that goes on immediately before Marvel’s big-top presentation in Hall H. Some remarked at the irony of making fanboys sit through the panel to get to their beloved superhero hype-fest, but that's not really a fair place to point a finger — about 40% of Comic-Con badges are sold to women, and some 44% of the Guardians of the Galaxy audience was female (the largest yet for any Marvel movie). Plenty of men in attendance would love to see one of the studios take a crack at a Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman — or even Spider-Woman — movie.
And it’s not as though the outrage online could get much louder or more persistent, as these past couple of weeks have proven.
So if neither the march of time and external progress, nor industry hyper-awareness, nor persistent public outrage can change the egregiously male-dominated culture of Hollywood, what can?
A single superhero?
By the looks of it, we’re about to find out. But it certainly can't make things any worse.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/03/11/will-hollywoods-depressing-treatment-of-women-ever-change/
It’s the time of year when a host of organizations release their findings about how the movie industry treats women both behind the camera and in front of it, and as usual, the results are depressing.
Martha Lauzen, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, published the latest of her “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World” studies today, and the results are typically dismal. Of the 100 top-grossing movies of 2013, women made up just 15 percent of main characters. 73 percent of all female characters are white–as Lauzen wrote in the report, “Moviegoers were as likely to see an other-worldly female as they were to see an Asian female character.” Female characters are younger than their male counterparts, too. 54 percent of female characters are under 40, while 58 percent of male characters were in their thirties and forties. And on screen, women work less than men. 78 percent of male characters have jobs, while just 60 percent of female characters do.
It’s easy to despair at an industry that treats women like we’re invisible, and is willing to tell some of our stories only when we’re young, hot, white, and underemployed. But rather than being stunned into submission year after year by these figures, I asked Lauzen and Stacy Smith, the director of the Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism where these figures come from — and whether there’s any prospect of changing them.
Lauzen and Smith agreed that one of the culprits driving down the number of female characters is simple, supposedly benign advice given to creative writers of all kinds: Write what you know. That’s meant to be an injunction that guides writers towards authentic insights drawn from life and research, and away from stiff, mawkish attempts to conjure up worlds and characters without having thought carefully about them first. But this maxim, while wise in its particulars, can end up discouraging writers from reaching beyond their experiences.
“Having lived their lives as males, men tend to create male characters,” Lauzen says. “Having lived their lives as females, women tend to create female characters. Of course, there are exceptions.” As a result, Smith explains, the dominance of male writers — they write about 85 percent of movies, according to her research — produces a predictable result. “It should not be any surprise that they are telling dynamic, engaging stories about men,” Smith says.
Certain trends in the treatment of female characters also tend to reinforce each other in negative ways. Lauzen found that there’s an age gap in movies: Female characters are predominantly in their twenties or thirties, while male characters are frequently in their thirties or forties.
“Favoring female characters in their twenties and thirties has some interesting consequences for the amount of personal and professional power a character is likely to wield,” she explains. “When writers and filmmakers keep female characters young, they also limit the amount of (believable) power that character is likely to possess. I think we have to recognize that our culture is currently grappling with how to react to powerful females, in real life and in film.”
Similarly, Smith notes that the occupations of characters who appear on screen may drive down gender diversity.
“Many of those,” particularly among supporting or background characters, Smith explains, “are defined by a particular occupation—like law enforcement, military, or politics. Occupational stereotypes that fall along gendered lines may be informing whether these characters are written as males or females.” In other words, if you have a cop make a fleeting appearance, or have your characters walk through a military base, it may not occur to writers and directors to think about the gender mix. Instead, they’ll simply default to putting men in those roles.
There are some promising signs, however. When Smith and her colleagues studied the box office results for movies released in 2007, they found a small, but not statistically significant negative relationship between whether a movie had a female lead and its American box office. But overseas, a female lead could drive box office in a positive direction.
Smith is cautious about her conclusions, noting that they’d need more years of data to say for sure that female leads are a consistent draw overseas. And she told me “It should be noted that gender of the lead character was less important than other factors such as production budgets, distribution density and story strength.”
But this seems like a promising line of inquiry. Disney’s animated fairy tale “Frozen” became the first movie directed by a woman to bring more than $1 billion, in part because of strong international ticket sales. The audience for “The Hunger Games” franchise, about a young woman fighting against a dictatorial government in a post-apocalyptic America, rose internationally from the first movie to the second, even as the domestic box office stayed relatively consistent. “The Hunger Games” sold $276.5 million worth of tickets internationally: the sequel, “Catching Fire” raked in $433 million. Similarly, over the course of the “Twilight” franchise’s run, the international box office for those films rose from $397.9 million for the first installment to $832.6 million for the last.
Smith and her colleagues have another study on the performance of female characters coming out this fall. If their initial findings, that female characters can produce better financial results for a movie abroad, are born out in this new set of data, that would be a radical challenge to Hollywood’s assumptions what works and what doesn’t.
And that challenge would come at a time when the international markets are critically important to what gets greenlit and what doesn’t. As the producer Lynda Obst wrote in her recent book Sleepless In Hollywood, “International has come to be 70 percent of our total revenues in the New Abnormal. When I began in the Old Abnormal it was 20 percent.” The initial rush to satisfy that audience has meant an uptick of superhero movies and projects like Guillermo del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” (an homage to Japanese kaiju, or “strange creature” movies). But if it turns out international audiences crave female leads, the repercussions could be enormous.
Some studios have started focusing more on female leads of their own initiative. Lionsgate, where Nina Jacobson produces “The Hunger Games” franchise, has been a first mover. Smith’s analysis of the top 100-grossing movies in 2012 found that the speaking characters in Lionsgate movies were 42.8 percent female. Lionsgate had hits across multiple genres — in addition to “The Hunger Games” and the final “Twilight” film, the studio scored hits with Tyler Perry’s “Madea’s Witness Protection,” Joss Whedon’s horror riff “The Cabin In The Woods,” and ensemble romcom “What To Expect When You’re Expecting.” The studio’s performance is a sharp contrast to Lauzen’s figures from the top-grossing movies of 2013, where overall, just 30 percent of characters who speak on screen were female.
The success of one studio may not turn around the entire industry. And Lionsgate’s dedication to female characters may have a time limit.
“When you’re talking about thousands and thousands of characters, small trends are not likely to move the numbers significantly in one direction or another,” Lauzen warns. “Overall, the film industry is experiencing gender inertia both on screen and behind the scenes.”
But Smith hopes that the industry will someday see the light generated by flashing dollar signs. “If females represent 50 percent of the population and buy 50 percent of the tickets, it is just good business to include them on screen,” she says. The next several years could show us just how big those dollar signs have to be, and how brightly they have to shine, for Hollywood to change.
mashable.com/2014/08/05/female-superhero-hollywood-spider-man/
LOS ANGELES — The Hollywood diversity discussion has reached the point of supersaturation online: Not a scrap of movie or TV news escapes the boiling rage of fans, bloggers — even filmmakers — who are fed up with the indisputable fact that women and minorities are heinously underrepresented here.
These voices are passionate, they are persistent and they are armed with depressing statistics, like the fact that less than one-third of speaking characters in today's top movies are played by women, or that women directed 1.9% of those films. And it's not getting better.
SEE ALSO: 19 Kickass Lady Superheroes You Should Know More About
Plenty of fuel for the firestorm has surfaced over the past few weeks, most recently on Monday, when someone high up at Sony Pictures Entertainment whispered to Deadline.com that the studio is developing a “female-led” superhero film from its Spider-Man universe. It was a calculated leak, meant to steal a bit of Marvel’s thunder as its parent company Disney was celebrating a record $94 million for Guardians of the Galaxy.
gamora
A scene from Marvel/Disney's "Guardians of the Galaxy."
IMAGE: MARVEL/DISNEY
It was also frustratingly half-assed — an appeal to the outraged without an actual commitment.
The studio, according to the report, is "eyeing" a 2017 release date, but hadn't sorted out which female character it would develop, and that’s largely because Sony doesn't have a bankable one in its stable. While DC has Wonder Woman and Marvel has dozens of marginally recognizable female characters, the Spider-Man “universe” is hardscrabble, particularly with regard to females. Black Cat? Spider-Woman?
But Sony's goal was met: While Disney/Marvel and Warner Bros./DC continue to hem and haw about developing bankable leading super-ladies, Sony swoops in and looks, for a moment, like the progressive one.
"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" New York Premiere - Outside Arrivals
Felicity Jones is rumored to be Black Cat in upcoming "Amazing Spider-Man" films and spinoffs.
IMAGE: JIM SPELLMAN/WIREIMAGE
It was empty and opportunistic, but it was welcomed. Why? Because this problem has festered too long, and the rabble is out of patience.
Sony was already caught crossing the gender streams when it was reported over the weekend that the studio was kicking around a Ghostbusters reboot with an all-female ensemble and Bridesmaids writer/director Paul Feig on its wish-list. He may do it — he more likely may not — but the whole thing stirred up a huge flame war between Deadline writer Mike Fleming and his own colleague, Anita Busch, a debate that played out on their own site.
But the truth is, Sony's overtures were just the cherry on top of a huge gender-role sundae that the Hollywood press has been scooping out for weeks. So many other stories have inflamed this already sore subject, including, but not limited to:
THOR 001_cover
Marvel comics’ announcement that Thor will be a woman. Yes, many actually cried foul on this one, the argument being that it's a temporary and thereby patronizing move, just a woman inhabiting a man’s role instead of the meaningful development of a female character.
Marvel comics’ announcement that Samuel “The Falcon” Wilson, who is black, would take on the Captain America role (apply above logic).
Lucy easily beating Hercules in a head-to-head box office brawl had many wagging their fingers that Hollywood is out of touch with what audiences really want.
The apparent obliteration of founding Avenger Janet “The Wasp” van Dyne from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by way of Ant-Man.
The apparent obliteration of Dorne heir Arianna Martell from the Game of Thrones cast on HBO.
The True Detective Season 2 cast mystery: After a season of white-male psyche, which was great, we've been promised a stronger female presence, including a three-lead ensemble that may include, you know, a woman.
And the ongoing controversy about the cast of the Star Wars: Episode VII, which garnered howls when it started out being heavily male-dominated. The project has since added enough women — six females among the 20 characters announced so far — to bring it almost exactly in line with the less-than-30% figure we see across the industry.
Daisy-Ridley
Daisy Ridley is the only "unknown" in the new "Star Wars" cast.
IMAGE: IMDB
The 30% figure (also referenced in the beginning of this story) comes from a study by the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, which every year surveys film and TV to divine the gender curve. The study is funded by the school and supporters of its Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, and the results are not promising — in particular because the discrepancies are deep, abiding and showing no signs of improvement.
In some cases, they are getting worse.
The biggest disconnect actually lies not with women, but with Hispanics, who make up nearly 17% of the U.S. population and buy roughly 25% of all movie tickets sold annually in the U.S. Yet only 4.9% of speaking characters in the top 100 films are Latino.
“Hispanics clearly are the most underserved racial/ethnic group by the film industry,” is the conclusion of a separate study by Annenberg, also published recently.
Hollywood may have a built-in excuse here, that the Hispanic population has been exploding in recent years — maybe they’re just catching up.
But as for women? Well, they’ve been around awhile now.
Annenberg reviewed a total of 4,506 speaking parts from the top 100 grossing films of 2013 to determine what this story has already referenced — that a mere 29.2% of those characters were played by women. That was lower than previous results from 2007 (29.9%), 2008 (32.8%), 2009 (32.8%) and 2010 (30.3%).
There are other slices of 2013 data that should make your blood boil, no matter what combination of chromosomes it carries: Of the top 100 films, 28% had a female lead or co-lead. Only 2% percent featured more female characters than males. Two percent. Of the top 100 films, 28% had a female lead or co-lead. Only 2% percent featured more female characters than males. Two percent.
It’s certainly no better behind the camera: “Out of 1,374 directors, writers, and producers credited across the sample, less than a fifth (15.9%) of these content creators were women. This calculates into a gender ratio of 5.3 male filmmakers to every 1 female,” the study found.
The most frustrating and confounding aspect of all of this is: What’s to be done? Because waiting around for things to get better does not seem to be an option.
“The prevalence of female speaking characters in film has … remained stable for decades,” reads the study’s conclusion. “Given the wealth of research on the topic, the lack of female characters does not appear to be a problem that will self‐correct over time.”
However, the study puts the impetus on “decision-makers and filmmakers” to “match the demography of their creative constructions to that of the individuals filling the seats at movie theaters.” Which, if you know anything about how people break into and then rise in Hollywood … sounds an awful lot like “Waiting around for things to get better.”
There are some out-in-the-open efforts here, in particular at its trade publications, to draw attention to the efforts of women in prominent roles. The Hollywood Reporter publishes an annual “women’s issue.” Variety and TheWrap host annual “power women” events that draw big names to their luncheons and red carpets. But at their core, these events are sponsorship opportunities, part of an events cottage industry that adds to the publications’ bottom lines.
Women Who Kick Ass
Katey Sagal, Sarah Paulson, Tatiana Maslany, Nicole Beharie, and Maisie Williams at the 2014 Comic-Con "Women Who Kick Ass" panel.
IMAGE: KEVIN WINTER
Comic-Con has hosted a “Women Who Kick Ass” panel two years running, an event that goes on immediately before Marvel’s big-top presentation in Hall H. Some remarked at the irony of making fanboys sit through the panel to get to their beloved superhero hype-fest, but that's not really a fair place to point a finger — about 40% of Comic-Con badges are sold to women, and some 44% of the Guardians of the Galaxy audience was female (the largest yet for any Marvel movie). Plenty of men in attendance would love to see one of the studios take a crack at a Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman — or even Spider-Woman — movie.
And it’s not as though the outrage online could get much louder or more persistent, as these past couple of weeks have proven.
So if neither the march of time and external progress, nor industry hyper-awareness, nor persistent public outrage can change the egregiously male-dominated culture of Hollywood, what can?
A single superhero?
By the looks of it, we’re about to find out. But it certainly can't make things any worse.
