by Hadley Robinson
Hollywood is a boys club. Gender bias and discrimination is overt. That’s according to the American Civil Liberties Union – which has asked state and federal agencies to investigate hiring practices at major studios and networks.
Indeed, the numbers are staggering. Women in 2014 directed just 7 percent of the top 250 grossing films, according to this San Diego State University study. Of all behind-the-scenes employment — including producers, writers and cinematographers — only 17 percent on average are women.
The numbers haven’t gotten better with time either:
This isn’t just a problem for the women applying for work. It also means men are writing and directing the portrayal of women. One of the film directors behind the ACLU lawsuit, Maria Giese, put it like this in an interview with AJ+:
“Movies are the cultural voice of our civilization. If women are cut out of that – if our perspectives can’t be shared – that affects the lives of everyone everywhere.”
When the vast majority of directors and screenwriters are men, it’s men that make decisions about how women are depicted (when they are in the film at all). San Diego State University did a separate study about the on-screen representation of women in film. Movies have a female protagonist only 12 percent of the time, and only 30 percent of speaking roles are women.
Most male characters were attached to a specific profession, and their marital status was unknown. Women were the opposite. In fact, last year just five percent of women movie characters were portrayed as leaders. This does not reflect reality. Women make up almost half the labor force and get 60 percent of undergraduate and masters degrees in the U.S.
Women on screen also tend to be younger than men, and are more often shown partially nude or wearing sexy attire. In 2012, 31 percent of women on screen were partially naked (exposing some breast, midriff or upper thigh), compared to less than 10 percent of men, according to the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.
Though women aren’t seen as much in movies, they watch just as many movies as men. And movies influence life. The average Netflix subscriber watches three movies a week! We look to movies to laugh, to connect, to follow impossible plots, root for underdogs and ponder love.
Yet the stories being spun are from men. And while a good writer can capture the human spirit, a male writer does not experience the world the way women do. While emotion is universal, the female experience is entirely different from the male experience, anywhere in the world.
Men in Hollywood are showing women the way they want women to be, or think that they are — and it’s not real. We consume these movies as girls, teenagers and grown women, all the while believing that’s what we’re supposed to be, that’s how we need to act. And those roles reflect what appears to be true in Hollywood — a devastating lack of female leadership.
It’s time we saw women writing the scripts and directing the movements behind the scenes, and real women coming alive on screen.
