“Gender inequality still has a starring role in Hollywood”

Several things have popped up recently about gender inequality in Hollywood. First this LAT article:

Cinema trends ebb and flow, but one facet of Hollywood moviemaking proving remarkably consistent is gender inequality, according to a study being released Monday by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

In a survey of the top 100-grossing movies of 2009 — including “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” — researchers found that 32.8% of the 4,342 speaking characters were female and 67.2% were male, a percentage identical to that of the top-grossing movies of 2008.

“We see remarkably stable trends,” said USC Annenberg associate professor Stacy L. Smith. “This reveals an industry formula for gender that may be outside of people’s conscious awareness.”

Slashfilm dug into the numbers of the Annenberg study and found this:

* When women do appear in films, they’re more likely to be eye candy. Jokes about Taylor Lautner’s frequent shirtlessness in the Twilight franchise notwithstanding, it seems that if a character is scantily clad, she’s stil more likely to be female. Female characters were more likely to wear “sexy attire” (25.8% of females versus 4.7% of males), “expose skin” (23.6% versus 7.4%), and be described by other characters as “attractive” (10.9% versus 2.5). What makes this more icky is that this sexualization applies even to younger female characters, with similar statistics for those in the 13–20 age range as those in the 21–39 group. Meanwhile, those figures dropped sharply for women aged 40–64 (14.1%, 14.1%, and 3.9% for attire, skin, and attractiveness, respectively).

* Hollywood is not kind to older actresses. Maybe that anonymous actress who sued IMDb had a point — youth really is king in Hollywood, especially for women. The gender disparity was lower for characters in the 21–39 range, with females making up 36.9% of speaking roles, but in the 40–64 group, only 24% were female. Or to look at it another way: Over half (56.6%) of female characters were depicted as being between 21 and 39 years of age, while just 22.2% of them were in the 40–64 range. In contrast, 48.7% of male characters were 21–39, while 35.2% were 40–64. Well… at least older women characters get to keep their clothes on?

Indeed we have evidence of gender inequality with the various recent THR Roundtables:

Nary a female in sight.

Then I bumped in this blog post from filmmaker and writer Katrina Richardson:

But because I am a woman, and because I am a woman of color, it will of course be about those things in the same way that a white male writing about a film, whether he knows it or not, cannot divorce his experience as a white male from any essay. Since “white male” is the world’s (and Hollywood’s) default setting, he believes that he moves through life race-less and gender-less, and so quite naturally, many of his reviews will not include mentions of gender or race. So deeply rooted is the white-male default viewpoint, even I find it hard to escape this thinking. When I think about script ideas, very often times I realize that the character I’ve been imagining is unconsciously a white man. From the moment he is born the way a white male sees the world, the way he forms sentences, the angles that catch his eye, will be different from a woman’s or a person of color’s. [emphasis added] Of course this is the case for every person, but race and gender, along with class, are the largest dictators of how the world interacts with us, yet speaking explicitly from these experiences (as opposed to the implicit white male speech) has long been diminished or dismissed as a niche. When you write about a film, you write about yourself, and if you are not, it is bullshit.

As writers, at least we can try to do something when we crack open a story: If our default is to start with a male, why not brainstorm the character as a female? I’m not talking about taking an already fully developed character and swapping genders, as that is the height of outside-in thinking, imposing our writer’s will on an existing flesh-and-blood character. Rather I’m suggesting that at the very inception of our story characters, we consider their gender. Straight from the get-go, before they are formed and shaped. That simple choice, a major fork-in-the-road — male, female — can not only widen our story’s cast of characters to be more of an accurate reflection of the real world, it could lead to more interesting characters.

Of course, choosing to write a female version of a character rather than a male is not a panacea. What we do with each character, the plethora of choices we make developing their personality and psyche is the critical process. However what if at the very beginning of that process, we simply ask a question: What looking at this character not as a [default] male, but as a female?

What say ye? A case of political correctness? A false way to approach storytelling? Or a mindset that can not only over time lead to more gender equality and perhaps even more interesting characters

[Of course, the same is true regarding race. Why not widen our perspective to think beyond a default mode of white characters?]

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