Setting Hollywood straight on gender

Actress Geena Davis has been holding closed-door meetings with Hollywood directors, studio heads, screenwriters, producers and casting agents - all the people that bring characters and stories to audiences. She's pressing them on something that supposedly progressive Hollywood thought it had overcome years ago: the alarming disparities in how the genders are depicted on screen.

Consider something as humdrum and seemingly innocuous as crowd scenes. They're overwhelmingly populated by male characters. Even in animated films, those kid-friendly box office hits that one might assume are held to a higher standard of inclusiveness, female characters are few and far between. Davis noticed this when she began watching movies with her then-toddler daughter.

In group scenes of family films, only 17 percent of the characters are female. The statistic holds almost regardless of setting, according to studies conducted by the University of southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism commissioned by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

Other research analyzed nearly 12,000 speaking roles and found that only 11 percent of family films, 19 percent of children's shows and 22 percent of prime-time programs feature girls and women in roughly half of all speaking parts. Surprisingly, family films often are found to over-sexualize female characters.

Teeny waists, voluptuous curves ... we all recognize the non-lifelike proportions. Male characters didn't suffer the same 'eye candy” fate.

To see how lopsided movies are from a gender perspective, Davis recommends submitting them to the so-called Bechdel test. A film passes if at least two women talk to each other about something other than men. Start noticing. It's astounding how many do not meet that low standard.

The good news is that executives tend to react favorably when Davis shows them the data. Sometimes, even immediately, scripts are changed on the spot, such as by rephrasing casting directions to specify that half the crowd in a scene is female. Film critics could do wonders by noting such things in reviews.

Another item on Davis' agenda is tackling what she views as one of Hollywood's greatest myths: the idea that women will watch films with male leads but not so much the reverse.

Dispelling that notion will make a nice sequel.