As consumers of media we know that things are biased. That's why it is so important that we have data to backup what we are seeing and feeling. And it's great that we have people like Geena Davis who are willing to stand up and say, yes, things are biased and they must change.
The Institute that bears her name released its latest study on the status of women and girls in the media at the third Annual Symposium on Gender Media.
The study was conducted by Stacy L. Smith, PhD with Marc Choueiti, Ashley Prescott & Katherine Pieper who are all from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at USC. These fine people analyzed 11,927 speaking characters for gender roles across three media: films rated (G, PG, PG-13); prime-time programs on 10 channels; and 36 children's TV shows.
Here's a shocker. The media is rife with sexism. Overall, there are many more males characters across all media. Here's a quote form the excutive summary that should give us all pause: "Few stories are "gender-balanced" or show females in 45-55% of all speaking roles. Only 11% of family films, 19% of children's shows, and 22% of prime-time programs feature girls and women in roughly half of all speaking parts."
And from the conclusion:
Female characters are still sidelined, stereotyped, and sexualized in popular entertainment content...Females are not only missing from popular media, when they are on screen, they seem to be there for decoration—and not engaging in meaningful or prestigious employment...
Digging down into the data:
- It is worse in movies than it is on TV. Women characters appear on prime time programs 38.9% of the time and on children's shows 30.8% of the time but only in family films 28.3% of the time.
- Hardly any media shows a gender balance. Only 11% of family films, 19% of children's shows, and 22% of prime-time programs feature girls and women in roughly half of all speaking parts.
- Dramas and comedies have huge gender imbalances between female and male characters. Women make up 40.3% of characters in dramas and just 31.5% of characters in comedies and 30.5% of children's shows.
- Reality shows and news magazines are the most gender balanced genres on TV. Women make up 48.1% of reality TV characters and 46.6% of news magazines characters.
- The higher the rating the less girls and women appear. In G rated films the percentage of female characters is 31.6% and in PG-13 the percentage goes down to 26.5%.
- Children's shows that are Y (35.4%) or G (34.9%) rated feature more girls than shows that are Y7 rated (16.2%).
Females are way more sexualized in all genres and mediums. (See table below)
Here's a quote: "Females, when they are on screen, are still there to provide eye candy to even the youngest viewers."
While women make up 47% of the labor force in the US, they only occupy 20.3% of total on screen occupations in family films and 34.4% of all jobs in prime-time programs, and 25.3% of those employed in children's shows.
And in the jobs that women occupy very few are high powered positions. 2 women were in the CEO type positions in family films and 7 in prime time. Not one female character was depicted at the top of the financial sector, legal, or journalism across the sample films. In prime time females occupying 42.9% of characters with financial clout yet there was only one top woman in the journalism field.
For the Sciences and Math and Tech- In the movies not one woman was shown with a STEM career and 14 men worked in those fields.
And forget playing a president or high profile political figure:
In politics, not one speaking character plays a powerful American female political figure across 5,839 speaking characters in 129 family films. Men, however, held over 45 different prestigious U.S. political positions (i.e., President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, Advisors, Senators, Representatives, Mayors, Governors) in G, PG, and PG-13 movies. As a point of comparison, over a quarter of the politicians in prime time are female (27.8%).
Every time I read these studies it just reminds me how much work still needs to be done. It is imperative that we keep pushing and pushing and reminding people that this work is vital for both boys and girls and their futures.
Source
Also, I'm a bad person. I don't care if the woman's numbers stay high in "wearing sexy attire" and "w/some nudity" as long as the men's numbers go up to match. Although not in the children's shows--why are the men's numbers so (relatively) high there?
But I agree that wearing 'sexy clothes' is not the problem; the problem is that it's primarily women that are wearing said clothes, and are being represented as more sexual objects, rather then women that want to wear sexy or feminine outfits because they like it and/or it makes them feel good.
I also wonder when this idea became accepted as gospel. Granted, I never really studied the history of film, but from all I've read and heard, the line between films for men/boys and films for women/girls use to be less distinct.
(Then again, that refers to Japan TV patterns, which might be different in some manner)
I miss 90s TV. I grew up with Special Tramp Dana Scully and Cybersix and Elisa Maza and Daria and Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl and motherfucking Xena and Disney Renaissance heroines and CJ Cregg and Aunt Viv and Ashley Banks and Roseanne Conner and Joan Clayton and and and.
TV has regressed in a lot of ways, it's really disheartening. My sister and I were lucky to have what we did but my baby brother is ten now and he doesn't see those strong women like we did. My sister, mom, to some extent my dad, and I all try and teach him that girls are just as strong as boys but it's hard to counteract all the bullshit he's being socialized with. =/
In Beast Wars, for example, they added the first "female" Maximal 7-10 episodes in, and she noticeably doesn't have the cameraderie that the others have with each other. She's perfectly confident and does some excellent saving of the guys, but she's more solo operator than one of the team.
I really wish for a new show that has girls in equal numbers in the main characters and having real quirks and personality differences that made them something other than "the girl." Something like Gretchen and Spinelli in Recess---that still had three guys and two girls, but Gretchen was the brilliant sciencey person and Spinelli was the muscle---almost like a TMNT version where Donatello and Raphael were female instead of April.
And I'm gonna shut up now.
I remember that when Cardcaptor Sakura was brought to the U.S., the title was changed to "Cardcaptors" and the early episodes of Sakura fighting alone were not released until much later, around the second season, I believe. This was done because it was thought that fewer kids would watch a cartoon with a female lead.