Hollywood’s ‘epidemic of invisibility’: Study finds regression of representation
“Barbie” might have dominated the box office last year, but 2023 marked a regression for women in film.
According to a new report released Monday by USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and its founder, Stacy L. Smith, the number of top-grossing movies starring girls and women in 2023 dropped significantly compared with 2022. The study also revealed that the overall ratio of men to women with speaking roles in these popular films has remained relatively unchanged since 2007, despite years of heightened awareness around Hollywood diversity.
AII’s review of the 100 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2023 has found that Hollywood’s contraction is affecting its inclusion efforts. The study examined 1,700 feature films (both live-action and animation) to assess the gender, race/ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identity and disability status of those seen on screen. The gender and race/ethnicity of the directors, writers, producers, composers and casting directors also were examined.
Women and people of color drove 2023’s box office winners even as they continued to remain underrepresented in the industry itself, according to the report.
Among the key findings in this 17th edition of AII’s report is that the number of films featuring girls or women as lead or co-lead has dropped from 44% in 2022 to 30% in 2023. It is, however, up compared with 2007, when only 20% of the top-grossing films starred women.
“No matter how you examine the data, 2023 was not the ‘Year of the Woman,’” Smith said in a statement. “We continue to report the same trends for girls and women on screen, year in and year out. It is clear that there is either a dismissal of women as an audience for more than one or two films per year, a refusal to find ways to create meaningful change, or both.
“If the industry wants to survive its current moment, it must examine its failure to employ half the population on screen,” she added.
The study also found that just 11% of the 100 top movies of 2023 were gender balanced, meaning they featured roughly the same percentage of male and female characters. And only five of the top 100 movies in 2023 had more women than men.
Of the 5,084 speaking characters examined, 31.7% were women and fewer than 1% were nonbinary. The rest (68.2%) of the speaking characters in these films were men. This marks a slight dip compared with 2022, when 34.6% of speaking characters were women. The study discovered that there has been no meaningful change in this percentage since 2007, when 29.9% of the speaking characters in the 100 highest-grossing films were women. Meanwhile, only 1.2% of speaking characters in 2023 were members of the LGBTQ+ community — indicating no significant change since 2014 — and none were transgender characters.
The figures around the race or ethnicity of those portrayed on screen tell a similar story. While there was an increase in the number of films with protagonists from underrepresented races or ethnicities from 31 in 2022 to 37 in 2023, the report notes that overall progress has been marginal in recent years. Among the specific gains is an increase in the percentage of Asian speaking characters in 2023 (18%) compared with 2007 (3%). This can partly be attributed to the decrease in the percentage of white characters in 2023 (56%) compared with 2007 (78%), since the report notes that there were no other significant changes for any other racial or ethnic group from 2007 to 2023.
Movies are hardly more inclusive than they were in 2007, a new USC Annenberg study shows. ‘It’s so predictable, it’s almost tragic,’ said author Stacy L. Smith.
Additionally, only 14% of the top films in 2023 featured a female character from an underrepresented race/ethnicity, which is slightly down from 18% in 2022.
The study also cited a complete lack of representation for girls and women from entire racial or ethnic groups. In 2023, 99 of the top 100 films were missing American Indian/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander girls and women, 81 didn’t include Middle Eastern/North African women, 62 didn’t feature Hispanics/Latinas, 49 films didn’t depict Asians and 39 were missing Blacks/African Americans.
“The epidemic of invisibility has been left unchecked for years,” Smith said. “The result is that girls and women from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups continue to see their stories and their reflections erased in the most popular content each year.”
Winning the box office, playing record-setting concert tours, rallying striking unions, shaking up TV: Women ruled pop culture in 2023.
Among the positive trends the report highlighted was the sizable growth in animation in the number of characters from underrepresented backgrounds. The study found that 67.9% of all animated speaking characters in 2023 were from underrepresented races/ethnicities, versus 59.2% in 2022 (and just 8.1% in 2007).
Last year’s edition of the study revealed that, despite years of advocacy, Hollywood has failed to make any substantial gains on inclusion in its most popular films.
This year’s report also called out industry decision-makers for seemingly ignoring the various solutions that the study’s authors have proposed for years to help increase inclusion.
“The recipe for creating inclusion does not change from year to year,” Smith said in a statement. “We have advocated for the solutions in the report for several years, but unless executives and other decision-makers listen and make different choices, we will not see different results. The entertainment industry seems either too apathetic or too fearful to use the tools in their arsenal to reflect back to its consumers the world that exists rather than a skewed representation of the population.”
The full report is available on the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative website.
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