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I recently delved into several studies conducted by the world’s only research institute that analyses gender in media. Founded by the award-winning actress, The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media researches narratives, roles and stereotypes on-screen to get a glimpse into film-based gender dynamics, and how that compares to its real-world counterparts.
Their research analyses data over decades to bring to light roles and identities on screen that are now considered normative.
How people understand themselves and each other is not based on conscious calculations. We’re inherently story tellers. First and foremost, we understand life as a series of narratives and we understand ourselves within the limits of those narratives.
How you see yourself will, consequently, be skewed by your overall view of the world and its ‘supporting characters’.
We don’t see facts as facts, but we make sense of others and ourselves based on the narrative that we’ve been pruning since the day we were born. You carefully curate your identity based on aspects you take for granted – one of which is gender.
Ideas of gender are so internalised that we often don’t see its root, until it’s pointed out. As an example, writer and activist Soraya Chemaly pointed out one of the most internalised ideas that are equally misrepresented on screen – the idea that women talk a lot.
Surprisingly (but not really), “men speak more and for longer than women in mixed groups (classrooms, boardrooms, legislative bodies, expert media commentary and, for obvious reasons religious institutions.) Indeed, in male-dominated problem solving groups including boards, committees and legislatures, men speak 75% more than women”.
Less surprisingly, men on screen spend twice as much time talking than their female counterparts. And it’s been internalised to such a degree that in movies where women do speak as much as men, viewers misjudge their presence and feel that they’re speaking “too much”.
Because in our narrative, we’ve somehow come to the conclusion that women speak more. Sadly, that’s just the beginning. The Geena Davis Institute recently did a study, Gender Bias Without Borders, to analyse the nature of female characters in popular films across 11 countries.
I’ll let the numbers speak:
· Only 30.9% of all speaking characters are female
· Globally, girls and women are twice as likely to be sexualised – meaning they’re twice as likely to wear sexually revealing clothes, or be partially or fully naked.
· Comments about appearance are FIVE times more likely to be directed at female characters than male characters.
· Two samples fall behind: U.S./U.K. hybrid films (23.6%) and Indian films (24.9%) show female characters in less than one-quarter of all speaking roles. Big-ups, Bollywood.
· Teen females (13-20 years) are just as likely as young adult females (21-39 years) to be sexualized. Let that one sink in. Moreover, in children’s films the female characters are more likely to be thin.
· Only 23% of speaking characters in action/adventure films are female.
· Female characters only comprise 22.5% of the global film workforce, whereas male characters form 77.5%. Compare this to the real world where women comprise 39.8% of the actual global workforce.
· Out of a total of 1,452 filmmakers, 20.5% were female and 79.5% were male.
· Females comprised 7% of directors, 19.7% of writers, and 22.7% of producers
And that is the lie of the onscreen narrative.
Often, this has to do with the demographic of the film’s creators. Films with a female director or writer had 6.8% more women characters than those with male directors and writers. And when it comes to Hollywood, there’s also the contentious issue of race onscreen – which deserves an article of its own.
As it stands, the media has made and remade a masterful art of the male narrative. This is obviously not inherently a problem, because narratives are not absolute and everyone has a story. But the issue is that in the last 60 years, gender inequality on screen has remained largely unchanged.
According to the Davis Institute’s research “if we add female characters at the rate we have over the past 20 years, we will achieve parity in 700 years”. So with those resolutely unbalanced stats, yes it’s a problem.
Much like in the gaming industry with its own dearth of female protagonists, the industry often uses the excuse that films about women simply don’t sell as well. When, in fact, movies that feature women in meaningful roles have actually been studied to make more money.
At this stage, the structure of global films is not a question of practicality, but an unwillingness to change.
The danger now lies in consumers being ignorant of the one-dimensional narrative. Most people who are subjected to the media, myself included, are generally quite unaware of the true extent of gender discrepancies.
I don’t go into a movie looking for gender differences; neither does the average person. Yet these are the movies I grew up with and they’re the ones that boys and girls will grow up watching.
We see the results of gender inequality every day – from daily prejudices to countless cases of harassment and sexual violence. All of which stems from perceived ideas of male and female roles. I’m not saying films are to blame for global gender inequality – but it’s an exaggerated funhouse mirror of how we perceive gender roles in reality.
It’s also important to remember that these solidified roles in the media are just as toxic to boys, who live in a world where aggressive masculinity and suppressed emotion are supposed to define whether they are “men”.
And that appearance and passiveness (essentially, sexual objectification) are a woman’s primary qualities.
Yes, humans are storytellers. And we understand life in a series of narratives. And if these are the narratives that are fed to children from a young age, then that becomes a part of their identity.
They’re wired to internalise what they see, and understand themselves based on the roles of others. So can we be surprised if a young girl or boy, fed on a staple diet of mainstream media, forms their self-image, imagination and aspirations based on the stories we show them?
Not even Matel’s new retarded Computer-Engineer Barbie story can make that better.
As Chemaly puts it: “Girls and women, infinitely diverse in their interests, appearance, ambition, ability, aspirations, make up more than 50 percent of the human population, but you would never know any of this watching our top grossing films. So how can we continue telling these fundamentally destructive stories to children?”
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