It’s no secret Hollywood isn’t exactly awash with strong female television and movie characters. But actress Geena Davis has moved to prove just how dire the situation is by releasing research from her ‘gender in the media’ think tank that finds the glass ceiling is as real on the screen as it is in real life.
Partnering with the University of California, Los Angeles, the Geena Davis Institute investigated gender roles and occupations in television and children’s films.
According to the study, gender imbalance is very much alive on prime-time, with only 38.9% of main characters on top-rated shows being female, and a large percentage of stories on prime-time being “extremely” male centric — with men taking on 75% or more of the speaking roles.
Analysing more than 11,900 speaking characters across 129-top grossing family films (released between 2006-2011), 275 prime-time television programs and 26 children’s TV shows that aired during 2011, the study concluded that while 44.3% of female characters were employed on prime-time shows (which is reasonably close to the 46.7% of real-life working women in the US), the glass ceiling was still very much intact on television, with only 14% of those women holding top level corporate positions, 27.8% shown in high-level political roles and zero women shown in high level jobs in the judicial system.
The number is even worse on children’s shows, with just 3.4% of women shown to hold top leadership positions in companies and only 4.5% in high level political jobs. These numbers are a long way off from the 25% of women who currently hold the top jobs in companies in the US, according to NPR.
And although prime-time television may be good at depicting working women, they haven’t quite nailed the part where career-focused women also have children.
According to Jennifer Newsom, director of Miss Representation, a 2011 documentary that explores women in media, almost none of the characters shown as career-driven women on television have children, despite the fact that 60% of working women in the US are also mothers.
She says she was told by a top television executive that the reason for the lack of working mums on television is because people “feel weird” about women not staying home to look after their children.
According to NPR, she says the response she received was along the lines of: “Well, you know, our focus study group, they weren’t comfortable with the mother [character] working so hard and blah, blah, blah”.