Meryl Streep’s Right, We Need More Female Movie Critics

In London, while promoting her latest movie Suffragette, Meryl Streep asked a simple question: “Where are all the female movie critics?”

Now, this is Meryl Streep, a Yale graduate and 3-time Oscar winner, so clearly she wouldn’t ask such an important question rhetorically. She already knew the answer and boy, was it a depressing one.

Streep told the crowd at the BFI London Film Festival press conference for her new movie that she went “deep, deep, deep, deep into Rotten Tomatoes” — the film review aggregator that prides itself on being “the most trusted measurement of quality for movies & TV” — “and I counted how many contributors there were — critics and bloggers and writers and found that there were 168 women. And I thought, ‘that’s absolutely fantastic.’ And then, if there were 168 men, it would be balanced. If there were 268 men, it would unfair but I’d get used to it. If there were 368, 468, 568 …,” Streep said before dropping a bombshell. “Actually there are 760 men who weigh in on the Tomatometer.”

You can’t help but wish that when Streep revealed that number there were gasps in the room. Those shocked by such an appalling ratio. But, if you were asked to name a female movie critic would you be able to? Even better, is this critic someone other than Pauline Kael, who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991 and is the most famous female critic ever?

And there in itself lies the problem of where all the female movie critics have gone. None of us knows because none of us have ever really bothered to wonder or care. Streep herself may have only thought about it because she’s in a movie starring women, directed by a woman (Sarah Gavron), written by a woman (Abi Morgan) and aimed at a female audience and is worried about who exactly would be giving out a grade for a rather tiny film about female struggle. The topic, one may notice, is definitely on brand.

But, let’s not be so cynical to assume it’s all part of the promotion of the film — especially since some of Streep’s other choices throughout this press run (that T-shirt, those “humanist” not feminist comments) — haven’t been going over so well. Streep has always shown an interest in providing women with a female support system (see below, her overwhelmingly excited response to Patricia Arquette’s 2015 Best Supporting Actress speech, which asked for wage equality), even funding her own writers lab for female screenwriters over 40.

“The word isn’t ‘disheartening,’ it’s ‘infuriating,’” Streep went on to say about the film critic gender gap. “I submit to you that men and women are not the same. They like different things. Sometimes they like the same things, but their tastes diverge. If the Tomatometer is slided so completely to one set of tastes, that drives box office in the U.S., absolutely.”

Streep is right, men and women are different and why wouldn’t those differences play a role in how they watch movies? And it does, whether we want to admit it or not. According to a University of Cambridge study called “Assessing The Impact Gender and Personality On Film Preferences” done by Olivia Chausson using Facebook data, men tended to prefer action movies, while women tended to enjoy romance more than men at a ratio of 1:11. The two genders were equally split when it came to horror, comedy and fantasy films. Another study in 2011 looked at what men and women consider factors for a perfect movie. Women listed as their top three: happy ending, sad/tearjerker scene and song and dance scene. Men on the other hand listed car chase, nude scene and action sequence.

“Films take us on an emotional journey and allow us to feel a range of different emotions — what women want from a film is something which reaffirms a positive world view, whereas men want films which tap into the very basic attributes of being alive — death, adrenalin and sex,” Jane Crowther, associate editor at film magazine Total Film, explained of the research.

Knowing this, if men are mostly reviewing films, specifically ones aimed at female audiences, it does put a distinctly male bias on the final review. Will a male critic go into Suffragette with an open mind? I hope so, but I also would have expected a male reviewer (looking at you Rex Reed) to watch Melissa McCarthy in her 2013 film The Identity Thief and not write a review that spent most of its word count body shaming her. So with a film like this, being a woman may help get at the real crux of the film’s story.

Unfortunately, it may be harder for a female critic to be taken seriously for her take on the film. In 2013, Dr. Martha Lauzen, a researcher at San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, did a study about gender disparities and biases in film criticism and found that the influence of female movie critics was shrinking. Though it would be logical to think the internet would give more opportunities to writers, both male and female, the study found that fewer films were reviewed by women in spring 2013 than in fall 2007. The study based its findings on data from Rotten Tomatoes, just as Streep did, finding that the site’s guidelines for reviewers often leaned to more established publications where men did a majority of the reviewing. Unfortunately it seems that in the Age of the Internet, criticism has become less friendly to women. The “top male critics wrote 82% and top female critics 18% of the film reviews on Rotten Tomatoes in spring 2013, while in fall 2007, men wrote 70% and women 30% of reviews for the top 100 U.S. daily newspapers.”

Worse though may be the fact that men tended to review movies directed and written by women 15% less than female critics did. Female directed movies are already hard to come by, if they’re not even being reviewed it would certainly be hard to get any love at the box office, something Streep noted in her own findings.

Unsurprisingly though, when promoted, female-driven films do easily find their audiences. Just look at this year’s box office, which has been a banner year for female-driven pictures: Mad Max: Fury Road, Cinderella, Fifty Shades of Grey and Pitch Perfect 2 all landed at number one at the box office their opening weekends. Not to mention that Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck and Melissa McCarthy’s Spy both raked in millions of dollars while in theaters.

“Over half the world’s population is female. Why wouldn’t you target that audience more aggressively?” Now, that’s a great question Peggy Rajski, associate arts professor/head of producing at NYU’s Graduate Film Program, but one the studios still seem incapable of answering . According to Variety, even with those stats, female films are still deemed second-rate in comparison to films aimed at men, which often get bigger budgets and more promotional love before they’re released. Women (or the lack thereof) lead the conversation when it comes to Hollywood these days, but too often they’re not being respected. This starts with how they’re covered by the media.

“There is often a difference in language when discussing male- and female-made films, but I don’t know how conscious it is,” Donna K, a film critic for Hammer to Nail and member of the Women Film Critics Circle (WFCC), told Refinery29 back in June. “We use words, and a lot of words are associated with gender or have other inherent cultural baggage.”

Books that are aimed towards women fall under “chick lit.” Movies aimed at women are “chick flicks.” And female characters created to help the male protagonist become a better person are “manic pixie dream girls,” a term pretty much all women — including actress Zoe Kazan— agree should die a slow, painful death.

Jada Yuan for Vulture recently reviewed the Toni Collette/Drew Barrymore movie Miss You Already, which from trailers looks like it’s a Beaches for a new generation. But within her review, titled “Drew Barrymore’s Miss You Already Was Built to Make Women Cry, and That’s Okay,” Yuan made the point to say that it’s not the best movie, but it has its place. Its place being with a female audience.

“Perhaps it’s anti-feminist of me to have less stringent standards when it comes to a movie like Miss You Already, which operates entirely on feeling,” Yuan wrote. “But with a movie like this, the feeling it evokes for its target audience is the point.”

Miss You Already is about female friendship and as Yuan notes men probably won’t get it, but she saw “flashes of many of my own friendships: the friends who have been rocked by miscarriages, the friend who forgave me for being so scared by her hospitalization that I didn’t call or visit for two weeks, the friend I will always miss who didn’t make it to 22.”

The fact that Yuan felt it was important to mention that the film will likely be misunderstood by reviewers shows how well aware she is that she may be the only woman actually reviewing this movie for a larger publication. If a woman does go to Rotten Tomatoes to check out the Tomatometer, Yuan’s warning them they may want to take it with a grain of salt.

These anecdotal stories, as Dr. Martha Lauzen pointed out, “are attention getting, they reveal little about the relationship between gender, film critics, and movie reviews.” But, as she also admits, stories like Rex Reed’s fat-shaming and Jada Yuan’s apologist take on a female film show that criticism is a predominantly male activity.

To force change, more female outlets, from magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour to websites like Jezebel and Bustle, need to make a point to review female written, directed and starring movies. As The A.V. Club’s Katie Rife (a female film critic) points out, Cosmo ran zero movie reviews on its site last month. Not one. Female media needs to do better. They need to stop covering Kylie Jenner’s every movie and have smart, critical conversations about female films and the topics these movies cover. Topics that Cosmo and other are more than likely already covering in other areas of the magazine.

This being said, films about women by women aren’t just movies for women. Men need to be a part of the larger conversation too, reviewing more female-made movies and having smart discussions around them. These male reviewers don’t need to love every female movie because for these films any press at all is good press. But as Dr. Martha Lauzen found in her 2013 study, male reviewers tended to be as objective as females when they actually got around to reviewing movies made by women.

A diverse array of opinions is important in film criticism, but it’s become clear that the more female critics there are working, the more female films will be reviewed. This places the need for female critics in a larger context. The need to get more women reviewing movies isn’t just a female problem, it’s a Hollywood problem. Something Meryl Streep already knew.