The amount of lead female roles in the 100 top-grossing films plunged to 30% in 2023, according to the latest findings by Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
The study’s authors said the level fell 14% against 2022 levels. It noted that little progress has been made in terms of speaking characters for girls or women, where levels reached 32% compared to 30% in 2007 when the study began.
Since then the authors have covered 1,700 of the biggest box office earners and evaluated 75,328 speaking characters to explore representation by gender, race/ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identity, and characters with disabilities.
According to Monday’s report, titled ‘Inequality in 1,700 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ+ & Disability from 2007 to 2023’, some 11% of stories in 2023 were gender-balanced, or featured girls and women in 45-54.9% of all speaking roles. Less than 1% of all characters were gender non-binary in 2023.
“No matter how you examine the data, 2023 was not the ‘Year of the Woman’,” said Smith. “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.”
“Lethargic movement”
Findings on race/ethnicity also demonstrated what the report called “lethargic movement”.
While there was a significant increase among protagonists – 37 films featured an individual from an underrepresented racial/ethnic group in a lead or co-lead role compared to 31 in 2022 and 13 in 2007 – it is only marginally higher than the 35 achieved in 2021.
Across all speaking characters the percentage of white (56%) characters decreased significantly from 2022 (62%) and 2007 (78%); while the percentage of Asian characters in 2023 (18%) was significantly higher than in 2007 (3%), although it was roughly the same as in 2022 (16%).
Overall the percentage of underrepresented characters (44%) was similar to the percentage of the US population that identifies with an underrepresented racial/ethnic group (41.1%).
Girls or women of colour played lead or co-lead roles in 14 films in 2023, marking [a 22%] drop from 18 in 2022 and higher than the single film in 2007 that featured a woman of color protagonist. Only one feature in 2023 starred a woman of colour age 45 or older in a leading role.
Monday’s report also features an “invisibility analysis” that examined how many films out of the 100 in the study pool were completely missing girls or women from particular racial/ethnic groups.
In 2023, there were 99 films without both American Indian/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander girls or women. Some 81 did not include a single Middle Eastern/North African female-identified character.
Almost two-thirds or 62 were missing Hispanic/Latinas and 56 did not contain a multiracial or multiethnic girl or woman. Some 49 films did not feature an Asian girl or woman and 39 were missing girls and women who were Black/African American. The study found that 12 films did not include any white girls or women on screen.
Smith said the “epidemic of invisibility” had been unchecked for years, adding: “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.”
Some 1.2% of speaking characters in the top films of 2023 identified as members of the LGBTQ+ community, a level the study said had not experienced meaningful change since 2014. No transgender characters appeared in any of last year’s top 100 films.
The report also highlighted the absence of change in the level of characters with disabilities. In 2023, 2.2% of all speaking characters were shown with a disability, a fraction below 2015 levels. Characters were most likely to have a physical disability (73%), compared to communicative (26%) and cognitive (23%) disabilities.
Turning to inclusion behind the camera, women directors in 2023 accounted for 12% of all directors compared to 9% in 2022, a small increase that grows compared to 3% in 2007.
Over 17 years of the study, 6.5% of directors of the 1,700 most popular films were women, or 98 individual women directors, compared to 878 individual men.
Women have directed a maximum of four films (Lana Wachowski with films like The Matrix Resurrections and The Cloud Atlas, and Anne Fletcher (with titles including Hocus Pocus 2 and The Proposal) in the time frame, compared to 18 for Tyler Perry, 14 for Steven Spielberg, 12 for Clint Eastwood, and 11 for Ridley Scott.
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