Here's how gender stereotypes are plaguing Hollywood films despite progress
Female presence in Hollywood is on the rise. Image: Unsplash/Martin Jernberg
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- Women are making slow but steady progress towards equality in the movies.
- New research says two-fifths of films in 2019 had female protagonists – a record high.
- But much more needs to be done to close Hollywood’s gender gap.
For women aspiring to conquer Hollywood, the nominations for the 2020 Oscars made dispiriting reading. The nods for best director were all male – and not for the first time .
But a new study of the highest-grossing films of 2019 from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University shows that Hollywood is slowly changing.
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Last year, 40% of the 100 highest-grossing films featured a female protagonist – the largest percentage ever. Women accounted for 37% of major characters, up one percentage point on the previous year.
The study, It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World , analyzed 2,300 characters and concluded that progress towards closing Hollywood’s gender gap, although steady, is still painfully slow.
Seen but not heard
The author Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, professor of film and television at San Diego State University, says gender stereotyping persists in the way women are portrayed. For example, audiences were told the marital status of 46% of female characters, as opposed to just 34% of male protagonists.
Almost three-quarters of male characters had an identifiable occupation compared to fewer than two-thirds of female characters. And male protagonists were much more likely to be shown at work. Only just over a quarter of the characters who were leaders were women.
The World Economic Forum has been measuring gender gaps since 2006 in the annual Global Gender Gap Report .
The Global Gender Gap Report tracks progress towards closing gender gaps on a national level. To turn these insights into concrete action and national progress, we have developed the Gender Parity Accelerator model for public private collaboration.
These accelerators have been convened in twelve countries across three regions. Accelerators are established in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Panama in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean, Egypt and Jordan in the Middle East and North Africa, and Japan and Kazakhstan in Asia.
All Country Accelerators, along with Knowledge Partner countries demonstrating global leadership in closing gender gaps, are part of a wider ecosystem, the Global Learning Network, that facilitates exchange of insights and experiences through the Forum’s platform.
In these countries CEOs and ministers are working together in a three-year time frame on policies that help to further close the economic gender gaps in their countries. This includes extended parental leave, subsidized childcare and making recruitment, retention and promotion practices more gender inclusive.
If you are a business in one of the Gender Parity Accelerator countries you can join the local membership base.
If you are a business or government in a country where we currently do not have a Gender Parity Accelerator you can reach out to us to explore opportunities for setting one up.
Male characters are more likely to be heard, too. Two-thirds of the speaking parts were male. Half as many women were given an on-screen voice.
Overall, audiences were almost twice as likely to see male than female characters in the top 100 films, says Lauzen.
Her research shows that men continue to dominate action movies, while women’s roles were concentrated in horror films and dramas, with only 16% of action characters portrayed by women. Science fiction fared even worse – only 8% of protagonists were female.
Generally, female characters were younger than their male counterparts – more than half were in their 20s and 30s compared to almost 60% of male characters aged in their 30s and 40s.
Mind the gap
Women directed twice as many of the top films last year compared to 2018. A fifth of all directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers on the top 100 grossing films of 2019 were women, according to the Celluloid Ceiling report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.
Yet no female directors were nominated for this year’s Golden Globe awards or in the best director category at the 2020 Oscars . The report says the gender of the person behind the camera is key to delivering equality on screen. Lauzen’s analysis shows that when a movie has at least one female director or writer, women are more likely to be cast for key roles. When women direct, almost 60% of protagonists in a film are female, as opposed to fewer than a third when men are directing.
Hollywood is not alone in struggling with diversity. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report details how women around the globe are still paid less than men for similar work – and are seriously under-represented in senior roles.
The Forum says that at the current rate of progress, it will take almost a century to close the gender gap. Given the role of films and the wider media in influencing social attitudes, having more women on screen might be one way to accelerate progress towards equality.
This article has been corrected to reflect the fact that the Celluloid Ceiling Report is from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University not the Women's Media Centre, as previously stated.
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Race and Gender in “Hidden Figures” (2016) Essay (Movie Review)
Summary of hidden figures, analysis: intersectionality of race and gender, evaluative conclusion: the moral behind hidden figures, works cited.
Events depicted in the movie Hidden Figures (2016, directed by Theodore Melfi) are set in the time when the United States competed with Russia to put a man in space. When working on this task, NASA unexpectedly found talented scientists among the group of African-American women mathematicians who helped the entire organization succeed in reaching its goals. The movie follows the real-life stories of three brilliant and talented women, Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan.
Because of her skills in analytic geometry, Katherine was assigned to assist the Space Task Group under the supervision of Al Harrison; the woman immediately felt the pressure of her predominantly male white colleagues to perform her tasks quickly and efficiently without attracting too much attention to her persona.
Katherine was the first black woman that worked on the team of male engineers in the environment that was quite dismissive of African-American women. Meanwhile, Dorothy was informed that she was not going to get a raise due to her being a representative of the colored group. Mary was able to brilliantly identify a problem in an experimental capsule’s heat shields.
During their work, women had to deal with numerous instances of unfair treatment towards female employees of color, which can be considered the key theme of the movie. Despite this, Katherine managed to get along with her colleagues, who ultimately recognized and praised her for the contributed. Mary convinced the court to allow her to pursue a degree in engineering while Dorothy became a supervisor of the Programming Department.
The movie’s epilogue revealed that Katherine Goble was the one who calculated Apollo 11 and Space Shuttle trajectories and later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, the same year when NASA called the Computational Building at the Langley Research Center in honor of Katherine Johnson.
The literary element of Hidden Figures’ analysis will be focused on the specific theme: the intersectionality of race and gender. The three women depicted in the movie broke racial and gender barriers to meet their professional and personal goals (“Hidden Figures – At the Intersection of Race, Gender and Technology”). In the movie, racial barriers were more evident, like, for example, in the scene with segregated bathrooms. When assigned to help with calculations on the launch of Space Task Group, Katherine had to work on the east campus (Silman).
There was a scene when she asked her only female (and white) colleague where the restroom was. The woman replied, “I have no idea where your bathroom is” (qtd in Silman). Because of this, Katherine had to experience the humiliation of running half a mile in heels across the campus to visit a “colored bathroom.” It is noteworthy that the director managed to bring the injustices that women of color experienced down to the personal level, which was reflected in the most basic and routine activities such as going to the restroom.
Discussing the restroom scene within the context of the main theme of race and gender in Hidden Figures is important because it showed the tension between the urgent scientific work and the lack of logic associated with the discrimination that limited Katherine as a woman and a mathematician. In this case, segregation is not only an injustice towards a woman of color but also a barrier that prevented one of the brightest American minds from achieving success.
Scenes such as when other engineers put out a “colored” coffee pot for Katherine made modern viewers angry at the injustice and the lack of sensitivity the white men in the department had (Silman). Dorothy also experienced difficulties in being a Black woman in the male-dominated workplace. Throughout the movie, Dorothy’s supervisor Vivian consistently disrespected her and refused to give her the promotion she truly deserved.
However, as the movie progressed, viewers saw the barriers of discrimination against African-American women being destroyed. There was a groundbreaking scene in which Al Harrison (Katherine’s supervisor) broke down the sign that said: “colored bathroom” (Heathman). The scene was symbolic since it represented the desire of NASA as an organization to smash the barriers their Black employees had to face.
The three women’s stories may remind viewers of how some people fought for equality in marches of protest while others fought a different battle in office buildings by trying to prove their skills and value to those people who were not better than them in any way (“Hidden Figures – At the Intersection of Race, Gender and Technology”).
If to apply Daniel Bonevac’s “Making Moral Arguments” to the analysis and evaluation of Hidden Figures , it is important to differentiate between factual and moral premises that will lead to a conclusion and forming of an argument. In the case of Hidden Figures , the factual premise used for the formation of the government was that African-American women were discriminated against in the workplace, even when working on projects of governmental significance.
The moral premise is that mistreating individuals based on their skin color or gender is wrong because these characteristics do not affect their value as productive workers. Therefore, women of color should not experience discrimination, which was the principal argument of Hidden Figures overall. Evaluating the significance of the movie is impossible without stating that discussions about race and gender are still relevant to this day. While African-American women can hold any position in society and achieve success in life, it is important to remember that five decades ago they did not have this kind of freedom.
The understanding of Hidden Figures in the light of watching changed dramatically compared with the first impression because the movie did not resort to over-exaggeration and did not make a mistake of suggesting that racism completely disappeared when the “colored bathroom” sign was removed. It was unexpected since too many movies present a stereotypical scenario of a happy ending without acknowledging the historical facts (Cruz).
It is crucial to mention that after Katherine’s, Mary’s, and Dorothy’s success, women of color were still oppressed and perceived as inferior. Even today women of color working in STEM fields are more likely to be forced to prove themselves to their colleagues (Gupta).
To conclude, Hidden Figures is a remarkable story of the victory of intelligence over bias and prejudice. The depiction of the mundane events that occurred in the workplace showed that even the brightest minds were once put in a box and forced to follow the illogical rules that made no sense. It is recommended to watch the movie to enrich one’s knowledge of African-American experiences at the times of segregation of exclusion.
Cruz, Lenika. “What Sets the Smart Heroines of Hidden Figures Apart.” The Atlantic . 2017. Web.
Gupta, Shalene. “Study: 100% of Women of Color in STEM Experience Bias.” Fortune . 2015. Web.
Heathman, Amelia. “Hidden Figures: The True Story Behind the Women who Changed NASA’s Place in the Space Race.” Wired . 2017. Web.
“Hidden Figures – At the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Technology.” IBM . 2017. Web.
Silman, Anna. “Hidden Figures Shows How a Bathroom Break Can Change History.” The Cut . 2017. Web.
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IvyPanda. (2020, October 2). Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016). https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/
"Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)." IvyPanda , 2 Oct. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/.
IvyPanda . (2020) 'Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)'. 2 October.
IvyPanda . 2020. "Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)." October 2, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/.
1. IvyPanda . "Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)." October 2, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/.
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IvyPanda . "Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)." October 2, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/.
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