Alyssa Rosenberg flags new research on female characters in film:
[W]hen a new study from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media, produced by the scholars at the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California Annenberg, rounded up the representation of women in movies from the world’s top-ten markets outside of the United States, I was curious. Are audiences in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United Kingdom accustomed to see women on screen in numbers and in ways that might force the heavily-male American movie industry to cater to their preferences?
She explains the “mixed” results:
The study’s authors looked at the movies that played in those countries’ theaters between the beginning of 2010 and May 1, 2013. During that time, 29.3 percent of characters in American movies were female. Seven countries had a higher percentage of female characters in movies–Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom. But the numbers were not dramatically higher. The United Kingdom had the highest overall percentage of female characters at 37.9 percent, a figure that hardly suggests a yawning gap between what the U.S. provides and what international audiences are accustomed to at home.
Molly Mirhashem takes a closer look at the study’s findings:
Less than a fourth of all characters with jobs were female, while in reality women represent 40 percent of the global workforce. Beyond that, very few female characters held powerful roles in any field; leadership and “prestigious” positions, like judges, doctors, executives, and professors, skewed overwhelmingly male. Only 10 percent of workers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields were women, as compared to about 25% in actuality. …
The team further surveyed the levels of revealing clothing, nudity, thinness, and implications of attractiveness for female characters across age groups. For example, in the German films, 40 percent of all female characters wore revealing clothing (defined as “tight and alluring”). In American films, for comparison, 29 percent of the female characters were scantily clad. And in perhaps the most disturbing finding, teenage girls as young as 13 were as likely to be sexualized as women in their thirties.
The Dish 