THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE U.S MEDIA 2015

Tally of female film directors dipped; movies with gender-balanced
casts more than doubled in 2013’s top movies
Men were 70.8 percent of the 4,506 characters with speaking parts in the 100 top grossing
films of 2013, with women holding 29.2 percent, and roughly 16 percent—a rise of
10 percentage points above the 2012 figure—of those films had about the same number
of characters from both sexes.
In other key measures, all men characters outnumbered all women in 98 percent of
those releases. And there were fewer female directors in 2013 than during any of the
previous six consecutive years when University of Southern California researchers conducted
what they describe as the largest multi-year study of its kind to investigate
gender and gender-driven traits of American film and film creators.
Since 2007, when the USC Annenberg School of Communications’ Media Diversity and
Social Change Initiative began parsing the numbers, the proportion of female characters
with speaking parts in those top 100 films peaked at 32.8 percent in 2008 and 2009.
In 2007, the figure was 29.9 percent.
Also, in 2013’s top 100 movies, according to “Gender Inequality in Popular Films: Examining
On Screen Employment Patterns in Motion Pictures Released between 2007-
2013”:
In 16 percent of the films, women comprised anywhere from 45 percent to 54.9 percent
of the casts, a figure that these researchers deemed gender-balanced.
In 12 percent of movies, women were cast in less than 15 percent of roles.
Females represented between 15 percent and 34.9 percent of the casts in 52 percent
of the releases.
For R-rated movies, 68.8 percent of speaking roles went to men and 31.2 percent to
women. The respective figures were 28.6 percent for releases rated PG-13 and 24.9
percent for those rated PG.
By a ratio of 5.3 to 1—a rate roughly the same as 2012—male film directors, writers
and producers outnumbered women among the 1,374 persons in those three categories.
Men were 98.1 percent of directors. Women comprised only 1.9 percent of directors.
Men were 92. 6 percent of writers. Women were 7.4 percent.
Men were 78.4 percent of producers. Women were19.6 percent.
Two films had a female director; 15 had a female writer; and 84 had a female producer.
The number of films in which teenage girls were in hypersexual attire or had their
flesh overly exposed dropped to 17.2 percent and 18.4 percent, respectively, from
31.6 percent and 31 percent in 2012.
Spanning the initiative’s six years of research, slightly more than half of all female film
characters were aged 21 to 29. Fewer than 25 percent were aged 40 to 64.
One of the 100 films had no female characters.
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WOMEN’S MEDIA CENTER
The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2015 TOC womensmediacenter.com