New Report: Female Characters Still Under-Represented in Films

Posted on March 11, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Despite the critical and financial success of “Gravity” and “The Hunger Games,” it is still hard to find movies with strong leading female characters. A new report from Women in TV and Film shows little progress. The title is pointed: “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2013. Author Martha M. Lauzen, Ph.D found that

Female characters remained dramatically under-represented as protagonists, major characters, and speaking (major and minor) characters in the top grossing films of 2013. Females comprised 15% of protagonists, 29% of major characters, and 30% of all speaking characters. Only 13% of the top 100 films featured equal numbers of major female and male characters, or more major female characters than male characters. Female characters were younger than their male counterparts and were more likely than males to have an identifiable marital status. Further, female characters were less likely than males to have clearly identifiable goals or be portrayed as leaders of any kind.

The findings on racial diversity were even more dismal. “Moviegoers were as likely to see an other-worldly female as they were to see an Asian female character.”

I hope this report embarrasses the studios into doing better in 2014.

Women’s History Month: American Masters Tribute

Posted on March 10, 2014 at 8:00 am

The PBS series “American Masters” pays tribute to 10 great American women in honor of Women’s History Month. Here is one of my favorites, about Aretha Franklin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY5u8AzbChw

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Gender and Diversity Television

Lupita Nyoung’o Made a Beautifully Gracious Statement

Posted on March 1, 2014 at 3:59 pm

I hope Lupita Nyoung’o wins the Best Supporting Actress award tomorrow night. She deserves it. But there’s another reason: I want to hear her acceptance speech. Her speech at the Essence Awards this week was beautifully heartfelt, gracious, and wise. She talked very frankly about the difficulty of feeling beautiful with dark skin, and how she felt when she received a fan letter from a young girl who said she had been about to try a skin-lightening cream before she saw Nyoung’o and realized that it was possible to be dark-skinned and successful. Nyoung’o said:

What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion for yourself and for those around you. That kind of beauty enflames the heart and enchants the soul. It is what got Patsey in so much trouble with her master, but it is also what has kept her story alive to this day. We remember the beauty of her spirit even after the beauty of her body has faded away.

And so I hope that my presence on your screens and in the magazines may lead you, young girl, on a similar journey. That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside.

SNL Adds A New Cast Member: Sasheer Zamata

Posted on January 6, 2014 at 4:34 pm

Saturday Night Live has added Sasheer Zamata to the cast. She graduated from the University of Virginia and has performed with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. SNL producer Lorne Michaels has been criticized for the lack of diversity in the cast and has recently been auditioning several women of color. The recent episode hosted by Kerry Washington spoofed SNL’s failure to have a black woman in the cast since Maya Rudolph left five years ago by having Washington keep running off stage to play several different roles. Sasheer Zamata looks like a terrific addition to the cast and I hope the audition process produced several other candidates we will see later on.

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Actors Gender and Diversity Television

Geena Davis Can Fix Hollywood Gender Stereotypes in Two Steps

Posted on December 13, 2013 at 3:58 pm

Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis has been a leader in understanding and improving the role of women in media. The founder of her namesake Institute on Gender in Media wrote a piece for the Hollywood Reporter citing data showing that there are three male characters for every speaking female in family-rated films: “We are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space.”

She proposes “two easy steps” for change.

Step 1: Go through the projects you’re already working on and change a bunch of the characters’ first names to women’s names. With one stroke you’ve created some colorful unstereotypical female characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they’ve had a gender switch. What if the plumber or pilot or construction foreman is a woman? What if the taxi driver or the scheming politician is a woman? What if both police officers that arrive on the scene are women — and it’s not a big deal?

Step 2: When describing a crowd scene, write in the script, “A crowd gathers, which is half female.” That may seem weird, but I promise you, somehow or other on the set that day the crowd will turn out to be 17 percent female otherwise. Maybe first ADs think women don’t gather, I don’t know.

As Davis says, “If they can see it, they can be it.”