{"id":30831,"date":"2010-12-15T13:36:11","date_gmt":"2010-12-15T18:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=30831"},"modified":"2011-11-21T02:02:25","modified_gmt":"2011-11-21T07:02:25","slug":"the-gender-imbalance-in-family-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2010\/12\/15\/the-gender-imbalance-in-family-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gender Imbalance in Family Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Larry Harnisch, of The Daily Mirror<\/a>, sent in a link to a story at the NYT<\/em><\/a> regarding study released by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media<\/a> about the under-representation of women and girls in “family” movies — that is, movies rated G, PG, and PG-13. The authors looked at all English-language fictional G-rated films released in the U.S. or Canada between September 2006 and September 2009 (a total of 22 movies). They also looked at the 50 highest-grossing films for both PG- and PG-13-ratings, meaning a total of 122 movies is included in the analysis. They focused on characters that were either mentioned by name or spoke at least one word in the movie, leading to a sample of 5,554 characters. Of those, 70.8% were male and 29.2% were female.<\/p>\n

Consistent with patterns in Hollywood in general, women made up a small proportion of directors, writers, and producers in the movies studied:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The authors found that movies with female directors and\/or writers had more female characters than those with male directors\/writers, with writers seeming to have a stronger effect than directors:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, this could be because female directors\/writers actively try to incorporate female characters into movies or because studios are simply more comfortable hiring female directors\/writers to work on movies with female characters than they are other types of films, leading to a concentration of women working on such projects.<\/p>\n

Comparing the results of this study to an earlier analysis of films from 1990-2006, we see that the gender imbalance isn’t improving over time (though since the methodologies differed slightly, the data aren’t absolutely comparable and so are more indicative of a general trend; the authors did make statistical adjustments for the methodological differences):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, none of this gets at the content<\/em> of the films. The study found that female characters were generally younger than male characters, made up only 17% of group or crowd scenes, and often had plotlines that centered entirely around interests in romance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Larry Harnisch, of The Daily Mirror, sent in a link to a story at the NYT regarding study released by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media about the under-representation of women and girls in “family” movies — that is, movies rated G, PG, and PG-13. The authors looked at all English-language fictional G-rated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,129,343],"class_list":["post-30831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-media","tag-tvmovies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30831"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42167,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30831\/revisions\/42167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}