According toKaty Perry, our greatest living gender generalist, “It’s a woman’s world, and we’re lucky to be living in it.” But according to the results of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s annual study, it’s actually still very much a white male world – at least in Hollywood, where this study’s analysis is concerned. To be fair, they could easily be describing just about any industry or scenario in the United States, and possibly most English-speaking countries, but for the sake of time and my refusal to engage with J.D. Vance on this or any other issue, we’ll keep things moving.
TheAnnenberg Inclusion Initiativepublished the results of its annual report (viaThe Hollywood Reporter), which looks at inequality in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+, and disability representation in 1,700 popular films released between 2007 and 2023. And the results are not great, Bob. The study’s co-authors looked at the top 100 films of 2023 – i.e., the highest grossing movies – and found that only 30 of those movies featured women or girls as leads or co-leads, down from 44 in 2022. 30 is a particularly devastating number, especially when you consider the generosity of includingco-leads. Of those films, only 14 featured a female lead or co-lead from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group (i.e., non-white), and only three featured a female lead or co-lead above the age of 45.
It only gets worse from there.
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These figures haven’t been this bad since 2007, when only 20 of the top 100 movies featured women or girls as leads or co-leads. To put it another way: Of the top films released in 2023, men outnumbered women on screen at a rate of 2.2 to 1. In real life, women actually outnumber men in the U.S., based onthe most recent census statistics. The film industry is even more inequitable when it comes to underrepresented groups: 37% of films released in 2023 featured a person of color in a leading or co-leading role, while just 14% of those leads or co-leads were women.
While there were more movies with underrepresented leads or co-leads than ever before, fewer women were included in that number. 76 of the top 100 films did not include an LGBTQ+ character, and only 2.2% of characters in last year’s films were depicted as having a disability. The bottom line: movies and TV are not representative of the world we live in,at all.
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In an official statement accompanying the report, Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founderStacy L. Smith emphasized Hollywood’s clear refusal to make more than “one or two films per year” for women:
“No matter how you examine the data, 2023 was not the ‘Year of the Woman.’ We continue to report the same trends for girls and women on screen, year in and year out. It is clear that there is either a dismissal of women as an audience for more than one or two films per year, a refusal to find ways to create meaningful change or both. If the industry wants to survive its current moment, it must examine its failure to employ half the population on screen.”
Every year, one or two movies “prove” that audiences will see movies made by, for, and starring women. In 2023, it wasBarbie. In 2011, it wasBridesmaids. There was alsoWonder Woman,Mad Max: Fury Road,The Woman King,The Hunger Games, and on and on – rememberThe Silence of the Lambs? From 1991?! More than 30 years later, and we’re still litigating whether people want to see movies with female leads, despite mountains of box-office data demonstrating just that.
In fact, across 17 years and 1,700 films, only 123 were directed by women, and just 25 of those directors were women of color. Of the 303 credited writers in 2023’s top 100 films, only 15.2% were women. Interestingly (but not surprisingly), the report notes a relationship between female directors and female leads:
“Films with at least one-woman director attached were more likely to have female speaking characters on screen (43.1% vs. 30.2%) as well as female leads/co leads (75% vs. 22.2%) than those films without a woman director attached.”
It’s almost as if hiring more women leads to more women being represented? And that hiring mostly white men leads to mostly white men being represented? Weird!
