Film industry still failing on diversity
Study shows needle hasn’t moved for women, underrepresented groups
The chants for equality in Hollywood are in need of a bigger megaphone.
That’s because the film industry is still getting an “F” for inclusion.
No progress has been made in the past 10 years of popular movies in terms of including women and underrepresented 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 color, the LGBT community or people with disabilities,” says Smith, a professor at USC who wrote the study.
And that’s even with movies such as “Wonder Woman,” “Get Out” and “Beauty and the Beast” leading the box office last year.
The study combed through the past decade’s top-grossing films and found that out of 48,757 characters in 1,100 films from 2007 to 2017, just 30.6 percent of them were speaking roles filled by women.
In the 100 top movies of 2017, 29.3 percent of characters were from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups and 2.5 percent were characters with disabilities.
Perhaps most damning, across 400 films studied from 2014 to 2017, only one transgender character appeared. “And that one character was inconsequential to the plot and only appeared onscreen for a few moments,” Smith says. “So we’re really seeing an erasure.”
The disparity was equally disturbing behind the camera, where researchers found numbers at a standstill. Of the 1,100 films examined, just four had black female directors. Three had Asian female directors. Only one had a Latina director.
And 2018 “will be worse” for female directors, based on movies expected to be released this year, Smith says, 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 second chances. “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 males to be shown in revealing clothing, partially naked or referred to as attractive.
Smith notes that exposure to objec-
tifying 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”: 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. And it doesn’t take away roles from male actors. It’s additive, not exclusionary in any way.”