Geena Davis stands up for equality

Oscar winner Geena Davis cited some sobering statistics about gender inequality in film and TV in a keynote address Wednesday to the Canadian Women’s Foundation. In all films, said Davis, the number of female characters in crowd and group scenes is just 17 per cent. And in family features, “for every one female character there are three male characters. And of the female characters that did exist, the majority were highly narrowly stereotyped or hyper-sexualized,” she noted, citing a 20-year study by her institute. “Get this: in G-rated animated movies, the female characters wear the same amount of sexually revealing clothing as the female characters in R-rated movies.” The lack of awareness about gender inequality in film and TV is why the ratio of male to female onscreen characters has been the same since 1946, said the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. But through education, she’s hopeful the situation will change, noting film and TV creators are in “utter shock” when she tells them how few female faces are in entertainment projects.

“They just don’t realize how many female characters they’re leaving out, that they’re not populating the worlds they create with a female presence,” Davis, the 1989 best-actress Oscar winner for The Accidental Tourist, said in an interview.

Davis was addressing a breakfast crowd of about 900 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.