WHAT WOULD SHE SAY?
white men: produce, direct or star in almost 100% of the entire world’s entertainment media.
In addition:
of the top 250 US released movies in 2018, 92% of the directors were Men.
in almost 100 years, only one woman has won an Academy Award for Best Director and only six black male directors have been nominated.
of the top 100 grossing films of 2017, Male leads received 2x as much screen time as Female leads.
These plus plenty more gob-smacking statistics are revealed in the 2019 documentary, This Changes Everything, directed by Tom Donahue and produced by Gina Davis.
“As Entertainment Media is our country’s most culturally influential Global Export, it’s easy to see how it impacts the way people Think & Treat each other all over the globe...without equal participation of Women’s Voices in our Storytelling, the world is getting a skewed perspective of reality, leaving a two-class society cleaved by gender, right next to the two-class society cleaved by race.”
Turns out Hollywood was, and still is, the worst Title 7 violator of any industry in the US, even the coal-mining industry does better. Title 7 was designed to secure Equal Employment Opportunity for women and people of color, put into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
Turns out Title 7 is just an illusion especially in Hollywood, the leading maker of illusion.
How do we know for sure? Because never before gathered research, along with personal experience accounting by many in the industry, now stands as the proof. This pain staking enterprise was initiated by Geena Davis, Founder and Chair of the Institute on Gender in Media because she wanted her children to grow up in a world where they all saw themselves well-reflected on screen. When approached by Donahue, she gladly signed on as an executive producer, as well as film narrator inviting us to consider that:
“We are the Stories We Tell.”
And if 92% of the theatrical release movies, tv series and product commercials are written, produced and directed by White Men, then our daily experience and resulting culture must be in extreme imbalance in terms of representing who we are as a collective.
That men have dominated the production of all consumed media, not to mention all high-level decision-making across all of our social institutions to date, is not a ground breaking insight. What is compelling is the breadth of hard data points revealed in this film about the movie-making industry that helps us visualize that domination so clearly —not only in the numbers but also the protocol that secures the imbalance generation after generation— secures the implicit, unchallenged ‘good ole boy’ cultural norm of favoring men for positions both on and behind the screen .
2012
Because this construct has remained unsuccessfully challenged since movie-making adopted sound in the late 1920’s, none of us for the most part are even aware of how deeply we’re shaped by this bias. We don’t detect how we’re editing and defining our identities, based upon growing up with the bulk of our society’s storytelling conveyed through only a man’s perspective.
So engrained by this viewpoint are men, women, children and people of all colors and sexualities from a very young age, we cannot even possibly begin to point to it because it comprises our holistic social ether.
“Fish don’t know they’re in water.”
So the Male Gaze continues to unconsciously focus each of our sacred, nascent, self-constructions -limiting our destiny as individuals and ere go our entire society. Perhaps then, if we do look out and see that some things aren’t exactly working out for us, men included, it might be time to reconsider storytelling through the gaze of other and different societal stakeholders.
“My fight was not just about me, or the few thousand other women missing out on directorial jobs, it was my realization that the absence of women directors in Hollywood was tantamount to the censoring and silencing of female voices everywhere.”
Enter the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (GD-IQ), a ground breaking software tool developed by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University to analyze audio and video media content. Funded by Google.org and incorporating Google’s machine learning technology, and the University of Southern California’s audio-visual processing technologies, GD-IQ is the only software tool in existence with the ability to measure screen and speaking time through the use of automation.
To date, most research investigations of media representations have been done manually. The GD-IQ revolutionizes this approach by using automated analysis of media content with a precision that is not possible with the human eye or ear. It makes it possible for researchers to quickly analyze massive amounts of data, which allows findings to be reported in real time.
Developed to more accurately measure gender representation in film, it reveals female characters continue to be unrepresented in popular film, and when they are present, they have far less screen time and speaking time. To truly address gender inequity, female characters need to be seen and heard as often as their male counterparts.
Davis herself made the decision to work against bias after she did Thelma & Louise in 1991. “I was profoundly impacted by the reaction of people seeing the movie,” she says. “It made me realize, in a profound way, how few opportunities we give women to come out of a movie theater feeling inspired and empowered by this female character. And it’s the best part of a movie, really, identifying with a character and living vicariously through them. Men get to experience that every time they watch a movie, but women not so much. So then I decided I was always going to keep in mind, when making choices, ‘What are the women in the audience going to think of my character?’ Not that I wanted to play role models, but I wanted to play characters who are in charge of their own fate.”
“You can’t Be what you can’t See.”
“The thing is, representation in entertainment does actually matter in the real world,” Donahue believes. “It’s funny. I’ve been a feminist since 10-years-old, in a very right-wing family, because television showed me another way —through a show called MASH and this guy named Alan Alda. So here’s my hero calling himself a feminist —a bad word in my house. I learned through him about the equal rights amendment, about Gloria Steinem, Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore. I learned about being a feminist through the activism of a man. I feel it’s my duty. And hopefully, young boys will see that a male-directed this and think they can do this too.”
In 2017, Female-Led films made 38% more money at the box-office than Male-Led films.
In 2012, when Brave & the Hunger Games came out, girls enrolling in archery classes shot up 105%.
The forensic science industry is now dominated by women in real life, due to the huge success of NCIS and CSI tv series featuring female forensic scientists.
For more information:
pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/geena-davis-and-tom-donahue-on-this-changes-everything/
https://variety.com/2019/film/features/geena-davis-this-changes-everything-documentary-interview-1203286574/
https://seejane.org/research-informs-empowers/data/
#structuralchange #socialinnovation #womendirectors #womensempowerment #femalegaze #seeitbeit #timesup #acntbl #lifeimitatesart #valueshift #newnormal #GinaDavis
I serve clients, orgs and agencies as a Brand, Creative, and Foresight Strategist. My role includes developing collaborative approaches for business stakeholders and multi-discipline teams to solve complex problems or envision, create, activate, and achieve commercial success through the power of big ideas and compelling experiences for the people that matter to them most.