Now, let me just say, I take everything too far. (You should see my
kids' birthday cakes.) But having comprehensive data on how female
characters are depicted in Hollywood has proved to be extremely
valuable. Obviously, because I'm a colleague, I can go directly to
content creators and decision makers and share what we found. (The
research was conducted by Dr. Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.)
The basics are that for every one female-speaking character in
family-rated films (G, PG and PG-13), there are roughly three male
characters; that crowd and group scenes in these films — live-action and
animated — contain only 17 percent female characters; and that the
ratio of male-female characters has been exactly the same since 1946.
Throw in the hypersexualization of many of the female characters that
are there, even in G-rated movies, and their lack of occupations and
aspirations and you get the picture.
It wasn't the lack of female lead characters that first struck me
about family films. We all know that's been the case for ages, and we
love when movies like The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Frozen
hit it big. It was the dearth of female characters in the worlds of the
stories — the fact that the fictitious villages and jungles and
kingdoms and interplanetary civilizations were nearly bereft of female
population — that hit me over the head. This being the case, we are in
effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls
as not taking up half of the space. Couldn't it be that the percentage
of women in leadership positions in many areas of society — Congress,
law partners, Fortune 500 board members, military officers, tenured
professors and many more — stall out at around 17 percent because that's
the ratio we've come to see as the norm?
-- Geena Davis' "Two Easy Steps To Make Hollywood Less Sexist (Guest Column)" (Hollywood Reporter):