Published: 3 December 2012
Region: US, Worldwide
The new study has been released revealing how the girls and women have been stereotyped, sexualized and underrepresented in Hollywood’s family movies and kids’ TV shows.
The study shows that in a children’s media landscape men work and earn prestige while female characters are sidelined or not given speaking roles at all.
That is the finding of a study led by communication professor Stacy L. Smith from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and funded by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.
“Females are not only missing from popular media, [but] when they are on screen, they seem to be there merely for decoration,” reports magazine and non-profit news organisation Mother Jones.
Oscar-winning actress and United Nations special envoy Geena Davis has founded the Institute in 2004 after becoming a mother and while watching a TV programmes with her daughter she noticed women were conspicuously absent.
The study conducted by her Institute and professor Stacey L. Smith evaluated gender roles and occupations by looking at the 129 top-grossing family films between 2006-2011; prime-time TV in the spring of 2012; and kids’ shows airing in 2011. Female characters only had a third of the speaking roles. Women held only 20.3 percent of all jobs in family films.
“There are zero female characters in the upper echelons of business and finance. Zero in the higher levels of the legal arena, and zero as journalistic editors… In the C-suite it’s only 3.4 percent. And in politics, out of 11,000 characters, only 3 in the political sphere were women in family films,” said Davis for GOOD.
For the comparison, as of the 2012 general election, at least 81 women claim seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. That’s 40 times more than the number of female representatives depicted in popular films over the last five years.
