In “On Newsstands, Allure of the Film Actress Fades,” a New York Times article from this week, a portrait of a non-movie-star-centered culture is painted. The piece shows that today’s screen icons (especially the females ones) are being sidelined from magazine covers in favor of TV stars (Nina Dobrev), reality-show personas (Lauren Conrad, the Kardashians), and pop-star singer-songwriters (Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus). While the movie-star image is still holding clout in the realm of men’s magazines, where the likes of Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt continue to grace the majority of covers, the situation for actresses is far less certain.
Buried within the Times article is a study that sheds some light on why film actresses may be struggling to match the cultural traction of some of their counterparts in other fields of entertainment. Conducted by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the study “examines gender roles of speaking characters in top-grossing films” over the past handful of years, from 2007 to 2012 (though 2011 is not evaluated). “In total,” reads the introduction to the study, which was recently updated with the 2012 data, “500 movies and over 21,000 speaking characters have been content analyzed for gender prevalence, demographic information, and hypersexualization.”
The general result of the study is hardly surprising: the highest-grossing Hollywood movies rarely provide strong female roles. What’s even more disconcerting, though, is that the 2012 data is the most male-dominated of recent years. Out of the 4,475 speaking characters examined from 2012, only 28.4% were female, which is significantly lower than the 32.8% figure maintained throughout both 2008 and 2009. (The 2010 figure was 30.3%). This means that, in 2012’s biggest movies, for every one female seen on-screen with a speaking part, there were 2.51 males seen in the same capacity, a huge decrease in equality from the 2.05-to-1 ratio of 2008 and 2009.
Equally disconcerting are the study’s findings in the category of “balanced casts.” Here, the researchers were looking to spot the movies in which half (45-54.9%, roughly) of the on-screen speaking parts belonged to females. The 2012 figure in this category was a dispiriting 6%, up slightly from the 4% of 2010, but astoundingly lower than the 16.8% of 2009. Over the course of just three years, the amount of top-grossing films featuring a gender-neutral distribution of speaking parts has decreased by over 10%. And only two 2012 films, out of the 100 surveyed, had “a higher percentage of females than males” in this department.
These aren’t good numbers, and, though it’ll be a while until any concrete 2013 data on this topic begins circulating, the picture doesn’t look much brighter at the moment. Consider, for instance, the embarrassing treatment of the female gender in J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek Into Darkness, the year’s third-highest domestic grosser to date. Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful, the second-highest domestic grosser thus far, didn’t fare much better, as its general understanding of women seemed to be that they are a group of people driven to insanity by their overwhelming infatuation for a dim-witted James Franco.
Just the other day, Mark Harris posted a concerned tweet on this subject: “For those keeping count, it’s now been 61 days since the last wide release of a major studio movie starring a woman.” (The even-darker side of that statement is that one of the movies set to break the streak is The Heat.) Of course, there are bright spots in this conversation: Silver Linings Playbook Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence, whose The Hunger Games was the third-highest domestic grosser last year; and Jessica Chastain, who owned January with Mama and Zero Dark Thirty, and is slated to appear in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. But, at the very least, we need to set the bar higher than getting Alice Eve to strip in Star Trek Into Darkness.
What are your thoughts on the findings of this recent study?