‘No progress made’: Hollywood fails new diversity study
The chants for equality in Hollywood are in need of a bigger megaphone. That’s because the film industry is still getting a failing grade for inclusion.
No progress has been made in the past 10 years of popular movies in terms of including women and other under-represented groups, according to a new study from Stacy L. Smith and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
“Despite all of the conversation and the activism around issues of inclusion in Hollywood, the needle hasn’t moved for women, people of colour, the LGBT community or people with disabilities,” says Smith, a professor at USC who authored the study.
And that’s even with movies like Wonder Woman, Get Out and Beauty And The Beast leading the box office last year.
The study combed through the last decade’s top-grossing films and found that out of 48,757 characters in 1,100 films from 2007 to 2017, just 30.6% of them were speaking roles filled by women.
In the 100 top movies of 2017, 29.3% of characters were from under-represented racial/ethnic groups and 2.5% were characters with disabilities.
Perhaps most damningly, across 400 films studied from 2014-17, only one transgender character appeared. “And that one character was inconsequential to the plot and only appeared onscreen for a few moments,” says Smith. “So we’re really seeing an erasure.” The situation was equally disturbing behind the camera, where researchers found numbers at a standstill. In the past 11 years, out of 1,100 films examined, just four had black or African-American female directors. Three had Asian female directors. Only one had a Latina director.
Heads up: 2018 “will be worse” for female directors, based on movies expected to be released this year, says Smith, because of lack of opportunity. “Male directors are able to fail innumerable times, and fail forward,” she says, noting that female directors often don’t get a second chance. “But for female directors, there’s really this glass ceiling or invisible ‘quota system’ at work.”
Consistent with previous years, the study found female characters were more than twice as likely as male characters to be shown in revealing clothing, partially naked or referred to as attractive.
Smith notes that exposure to objectifying content can increase and/or reinforce body shame, appearance anxiety and self-objectification. “So it really becomes important the ways in which female characters are shown onscreen,” she says.
The study did offer solutions, including the use of inclusion riders and the concept of “Just add five” — that is, add five female speaking characters from diverse backgrounds to every one of the 100 top movies next year.
“These can be small background roles or even supporting parts,” the study says. “Repeating this process for three years will result in gender parity onscreen in 2020, and the first time equality would be reached in almost three-quarters of a century.”
“Just add five” doesn’t solve every problem, Smith says, but “it really does eradicate the epidemic of invisibility.”