{"id":55542,"date":"2013-05-21T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2013-05-21T17:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=55542"},"modified":"2013-10-31T04:13:50","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T09:13:50","slug":"tv-vs-the-movies-which-does-better-by-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/05\/21\/tv-vs-the-movies-which-does-better-by-women\/","title":{"rendered":"TV vs the Movies: Which Does Better by Women?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I live in Los Angeles where saying that you don’t like movies is tantamount to claiming atheism in a church. But I don’t like movies, generally speaking. In contrast, I quite like TV. Does this seem weird?<\/p>\n

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media offers a clue as to why I might lean towards television. \u00a0The Institute did a content analysis of\u00a011,927\u00a0speaking characters in “family films” (G, PG, and PG-13) and prime-time and children’s TV shows (see it here<\/a>). \u00a0They looked at the presence of female and male characters and the jobs those characters were doing. \u00a0In almost every instance, women had greater visibility, and better jobs, on prime-time TV than they did in either movies or children’s shows.<\/p>\n

Presence<\/strong><\/p>\n

Women are, for example, 39% of characters on prime time, but only 31% of characters on kids’ shows and only 28% in movies. \u00a0Casts are twice as likely to be gender-balanced on prime time (45-55% female), compared to movies. \u00a0 Half of the casts of family films are 75% or more male, compared to only 20% of the casts on TV shows and 39% of children’s shows.<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Occupations<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost half of all American workers are female, but they hold only 20% of the jobs on the big screen and 25% of the jobs on children’s shows. Again, here prime-time does somewhat better: 34% of the jobs on evening TV are held by women.<\/p>\n

The next two tables reveal how men and women are distributed among different kinds of occupations in films and on prime time. \u00a0Men are over-represented in almost all cases, but the disproportion in movies is almost always significantly worse than it is on TV.<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you’re one of the people that contributed to Star Trek Into Darkness<\/em>‘ $70.6 million<\/a> opening weekend this week, this data might not be surprising. \u00a0I didn’t count, but I suspect it falls into the 50% of films that has a cast that is at least 75% male. \u00a0It certainly didn’t pass the Bechdel Test<\/a>; the two female speaking characters, if I remember correctly, never spoke to one another at all, and so they couldn’t have spoken to each other about something other than a man (that’s the test). \u00a0 (Oh wait, I think one of the twins with tails in bed with Kirk said “hey” when he leapt out to go do something important, so that’s three<\/em> women with speaking roles).<\/p>\n

So, like in lots and lots of films, women in Star Trek<\/em> were woefully under-represented except as love interests for the two\u00a0protagonists\u00a0(Uhura in this movie and Carol, it was foreshadowed, in the next). \u00a0I’m\u00a0used<\/em> to it, so it doesn’t really stir me up, but that\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0mean I have to like movies. \u00a0I’ll stick to TV, thank you very much. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Hollywood.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at\u00a0BlogHer<\/a>,\u00a0Pacific Standard<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0The Huffington Post<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I live in Los Angeles where saying that you don’t like movies is tantamount to claiming atheism in a church. But I don’t like movies, generally speaking. In contrast, I quite like TV. Does this seem weird? The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media offers a clue as to why I might lean towards […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,2100,129,343,76],"class_list":["post-55542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-gender-work","tag-media","tag-tvmovies","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55542","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\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55542"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58026,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55542\/revisions\/58026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}