(Ahmet Yalçınkaya, Unsplash)
- Women are making slow but steady progress towards equality in the movies.
- New research says two-fifths of films in 2019 had female protagonists – a record high.
- But much more needs to be done to close Hollywood’s gender gap.
For women aspiring to conquer Hollywood, the nominations for the 2020 Oscars made dispiriting reading. The nods for best director were all male – and not for the first time.
But a new study of the highest-grossing films of 2019 shows that Hollywood is slowly changing. The Women’s Media Centre, a group co-founded by actor and activist Jane Fonda, says there are signs the gender gap is beginning to narrow.
Last year, 40% of the 100 highest-grossing films featured a female protagonist – the largest percentage ever. Women accounted for 37% of major characters, up one percentage point on the previous year.
Figure 1. Percentages of Films Featuring Females, Males and Ensembles as Protagonists.
Image: Women in TV and Film
The study, It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World, analyzed 2,300 characters and concluded that progress towards closing Hollywood’s gender gap, although steady, is still painfully slow.
Seen but not heard
The author Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, professor of film and television at San Diego State University, says gender stereotyping persists in the way women are portrayed. For example, audiences were told the marital status of 46% of female characters, as opposed to just 34% of male protagonists.
Almost three-quarters of male characters had an identifiable occupation compared to fewer than two-thirds of female characters. And male protagonists were much more likely to be shown at work. Only just over a quarter of the characters who were leaders were women.
What’s the World Economic Forum doing about the gender gap?
The World Economic Forum has been measuring gender gaps since 2006 in the annual Global Gender Gap Report.
The Global Gender Gap Report tracks progress towards closing gender gaps on a national level. To turn these insights into concrete action and national progress, we have developed the Closing the Gender Gap Accelerators model for public private collaboration.
These accelerators have been convened in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Panama and Peru in partnership with the InterAmerican Development Bank.
In 2019 Egypt became the first country in the Middle East and Africa to launch a Closing the Gender Gap Accelerator. While more women than men are now enrolled in university, women represent only a little over a third of professional and technical workers in Egypt. Women who are in the workforce are also less likely to be paid the same as their male colleagues for equivalent work or to reach senior management roles.
France has become the first G20 country to launch a Gender Gap Accelerator, signalling that developed economies are also playing an important role in spearheading this approach to closing the gender gap.
In these countries CEOs and ministers are working together in a three-year time frame on policies that help to further close the economic gender gaps in their countries. This includes extended parental leave, subsidized childcare and removing unconscious bias in recruitment, retention and promotion practices.
If you are a business in one of the Closing the Gender Gap Accelerator countries you can join the local membership base.
If you are a business or government in a country where we currently do not have a Closing the Gender Gap Accelerator you can reach out to us to explore opportunities for setting one up.
Figure 5. Historical Comparison of Percentages of Females and Males as Major Character
Image: Women in TV and Film
Male characters are more likely to be heard, too. Two-thirds of the speaking parts were male. Half as many women were given an on-screen voice.
Overall, audiences were almost twice as likely to see male than female characters in the top 100 films, says Lauzen.
Her research shows that men continue to dominate action movies, while women’s roles were concentrated in horror films and dramas, with only 16% of action characters portrayed by women. Science fiction fared even worse – only 8% of protagonists were female.
Generally, female characters were younger than their male counterparts – more than half were in their 20s and 30s compared to almost 60% of male characters aged in their 30s and 40s.
Mind the gap
Women directed twice as many of the top films last year compared to 2018. A fifth of all directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers on the top 100 grossing films of 2019 were women, according to the Celluloid Ceiling report from the Women’s Media Centre.
Yet no female directors were nominated for this year’s Golden Globe awards or in the best director category at the 2020 Oscars. The report says the gender of the person behind the camera is key to delivering equality on screen. Lauzen’s analysis shows that when a movie has at least one female director or writer, women are more likely to be cast for key roles. When women direct, almost 60% of protagonists in a film are female, as opposed to fewer than a third when men are directing.
Hollywood is not alone in struggling with diversity. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report details how women around the globe are still paid less than men for similar work – and are seriously under-represented in senior roles.
The Forum says that at the current rate of progress, it will take almost a century to close the gender gap. Given the role of films and the wider media in influencing social attitudes, having more women on screen might be one way to accelerate progress towards equality.
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