Hollywood still lacks diversity

LOS ANGELES — In 2016, Moonlight won best picture and Hidden Figures was the 14th highest grossing film of the year, but popular Hollywood films remained as white and male-dominated as ever.

A new report from the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism finds that the representation of women, minorities, LGBT people, disabled characters in films remains largely unchanged from the previous year, despite the heightened attention to diversity in Hollywood.

For nine years since 2007, USC has analyzed the demographic makeup of every speaking or named character from each year’s 100 highest-grossing films at the domestic box office (with the exception of 2011), as well as behind-the-camera employment for those films.

“Every year we’re hopeful that we will actually see change,” Stacy L. Smith, a USC professor and the study’s lead author, told the Associated Press.

“Unfortunately that hope has not quite been realized.”

Here are some numbers of interest from the analysis of 4,583 speaking characters in the top 100 films of 2016:

76: Films with no LGBT characters

72: Films with no Hispanic female characters

70.8: Percentage of white characters

66: Films with no Asian female characters

47: Films with no black female characters

44: Films with no Asian characters

34: Films depicting a female lead or co-lead

31.4: Percentage of females

25: Films without a black character in a speaking role

13.6: Percentage of black characters

5.7: Percentage of Asian characters

5: Female directors

3.1: Percentage of Hispanic characters

3: Female characters from underrepresented groups

2.7: Characters depicted as disabled

1.3: Percentage of American Indian and Alaska Native characters 0: Black female directors