The topic of women’s representation in film has been getting some attention lately. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media is launching a film festival highlighting women (and minorities) in cinema, and Cate Blanchett used her acceptance speech at last year’s Oscars to criticize Hollywood’s reluctance to produce women’s stories. However, the past few years have seen several female-centered movies dominating at the box office, such as Pitch Perfect, Frozen, and The Hunger Games franchise. Which brings us to the question: is female representation in movies really a problem? I decided to do some research to find out. (I didn’t actually go to the library for research on this post. I used the Internet. But this is still my default picture every time I do research.)
For this article, I decided not to delve into issues like stereotyping or how women were portrayed when it comes to female representation. That’s a complicated, multifaceted, and less quantifiable beast for another time. For the purposes of this article, I’m only going to concentrate on the simplest and most concrete measure of women’s representation in film: how often they’re represented.
According to a San Diego State University report of the top 100 grossing films of 2013, 15% of protagonists were female. 29% of important characters were female, and of all speaking characters, only 30% were female. Remember: women are half of the world’s population. How is it that women only make up less than a third of all characters with as much as a single line of dialogue in Hollywood’s biggest movies?
Well, it could be a matter of making money. Movies are a business, after all. It kind of sucks that women are still so underrepresented on such a basic level, but if movies Hollywood stands to make more money making films about men, they’re going to continue to do so. Maybe that’s just how it is. Since 2009, women have made up a larger percentage of moviegoers than men, according to box office statistics released by the MPAA. That number actually increased a percentage point in 2012. So clearly there is money to be made in marketing movies towards women: in 2014, movies starring women like Maleficent, Lucy, and Divergent were hits at the box office, and the #1 movie of the year was The Hunger Games, Mockingjay: Part. Transformers: Age of Extinction took the top spot worldwide, but Mockingjay had a significant disadvantage: it was not released in China, now the largest film market outside of the United States. And it still earned a #7 spot and $714 million worldwide. Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie’s cheekbones, was the fourth highest earning movie, earning $758 million.
No discussion of female representation in the movies would be complete without a mention of the Bechdel test. Named after a comic strip by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the test is very simple: to pass, a movie has to 1) have at least two named female characters, 2) who speak to each other, 3) about something other than a man. It’s a pretty basic yardstick for female representation in film. As critics of the test have noted, this test doesn’t even measure if a particular film is sexist or not. But what’s striking about the test is not what it says about individual movies, but what it says of the film industry as a whole: an astonishing number of movies fail the Bechdel test, whereas very few would fail the reverse test (two named male characters speaking to each other about something other than a woman).
Polling aggregation website FiveThirtyEight.com did a study of 1,615 films released from 1990 to 2013. Less than 50% decisively passed. What’s more, films that passed the test had a median budget of $31.7 million — 35% less than films that did not pass the test, which had a median budget of $48.4 million. But adjusted for budget, movies with female representation actually saw better returns on investment: movies that passed the Bechdel test had a median gross return of $2.68 per dollar spent, compared to a median of $2.45 for movies that failed. This means that if movies about women are doing worse at the box office, it’s because studios are less willing to invest in them — not because audiences don’t want to see women.
So, women are more likely to watch movies, some of the most successful movies of the past few years have had female protagonists, and movies with adequate female representation actually get better returns on investment. In spite of this, women are still outnumbered 2:1 on screen, and are only protagonists 15% of the time. That’s not even going into the representation of women off screen (4.4% of directors and 16% of all production jobs), or the representation of minority or LGBT women.
Okay. What’s the problem? I think the fact that Hollywood — one of the biggest, most corporate, most calculated machines there is in the entertainment world — is still so reluctant to make movies about women, despite significant evidence that it would be financially beneficial to do so, says a lot about our culture on its own. As Geena Davis puts it: “If [kids] are seeing a wildly skewed ratio of male to female characters, and they are seeing female characters that are not doing as much or not doing important things… It’s imprinting a message from the very beginning that girls are less valuable than boys.”
The good news is that things are looking to get better. Women in the industry like Geena Davis and Cate Blanchett are calling the studios out more often, and after the success of movies like Frozen and The Hunger Games, Hollywood is definitely taking notice. Fifty Shades of Grey is being predicted to earn as much as $60 million in its opening weekend. An all-female reboot of Ghostbusters is in the works, and Felicity Jones was recently announced to be getting her own Star Wars spinoff. And of course, Disney nearly broke the Internet with the announcement that Emma Watson would be playing Belle in the live-action Beauty and the Beast.
But an issue that’s getting better is still an issue. Those 2013 numbers were an improvement from 2011, but lower than in 2002 — meaning female representation hasn’t actually changed much in the past decade. And while Marvel and DC did announce plans for female-led superhero movies, with films about Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and a female-centered Spider-Man spinoff in the works, those are only 3 of the 40 such movies slated for the next six years. Could that be chalked up to comic book superheroes generally having been disproportionately male? Sure. But that’s still no reason for Ant-Man to get a movie before Wonder Woman.
UPDATE: When initially researching this article, the most recent statistics were for 2013 (the year of Frozen, Gravity, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire). This week, the statistics for the top films of 2014 (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Maleficent, Lucy, and Divergent) came out. The percentage of female protagonists has decreased from 15% in 2013 to 12% in 2014.