Gender in Media: Females Don't Rule
Gender bias in media is a topic society has been tiptoeing around since the women's liberation movement of the 1960s. Although women represent 51% of the population, a woman has yet to achieve the position of president of the United States -- though one is trying -- and for some reason the number of women represented in animation or G-rated entertainment is not even close to the number of men. Why?
Actress Geena Davis, who has portrayed moms and swashbucklers, asked that very question while she was watching TV with her then two-year-old daughter. On her fingers, she started counting girls on the screen in lead roles. Then she counted the girls in the crowd scenes. She had too many fingers left over.
"I was absolutely stunned to see the disparity in the ratio of genders. There seemed to be a lot more male characters than female characters," said Davis. "I decided I wanted to find out if this was true -- if it was across the board. I wanted to do something about it. Bring attention to it or talk to the studios."
She did just that. She formed the Geena Davis Institute of Gender in Media (GDIGM) and partnered with USC's Annenberg School of Communications to undertake the largest study of live-action and animated G-rated movies ever.
Under the direction of Dr. Stacy L. Smith, Principal Researcher, GDIGM Board Member, and associate professor at the Annenberg School, and Crystal Allene Cook, director of GDIGM, a team of researchers watched over 400 top-grossing G, PG, PG-13 and R live-action and animated movies produced from 1999 to 2006, and 1,034 television shows for kids, including 534 hours of programming between June 12 and August 18, 2005.
The results were not entirely surprising, but they were still eye-opening. Male characters outnumbered female characters in all genres by as much as 2:1, not only in lead speaking roles, but even in crowd scenes. The girls and women portrayed were "hypersexualized" for the most part, and still largely fulfilled what the researchers identified as three stereotypical female roles:
The one area in which there was some equality was preschool programming. Girls and boys played similar roles and were represented in more equal numbers.
Dr. Smith and her team gathered a wealth of statistics. They compared the human form to animated figures for both males and females. They looked at hypersexuality as it pertained to both male and female characters. They even evaluated the use of female narrators to male narrators. These findings were presented at the GDIGM 2008 Conference on Children and Gender in Film and Television held at USC for three days in January 2008.
During the presentation of this paper, panelists from television and film, as well as researchers, were asked how to create parity in entertainment. No conclusive answer was given. For this article, AWN asked a few leading members of the animation community to give their opinions on the subject.
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by terming it a non issue you have finally proved that men really feel inferior and are extremely scared.
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