Geena Davis Shares Two Simple Steps for Making Hollywood Less Sexist

[KitSileya]

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/geena-davis-shares-two-simple-steps-to-make-hollywood-less-sexist-20140626

Geena Davis doesn't just play strong women onscreen in films like "Thelma & Louise" and "A League of Their Own," she also helps them succeed in real life, through her Institute on Gender in Media, which is behind some of the most thorough research on the media's depictions of gender and sex.

Writing in The Hollywood Reporter for its Women in Entertainment Power 100 issue, David shares the research of USC's Dr. Stacy Smith, who found that for every single female speaking character in family-rated films (i.e., not R-rated), there are three male characters, and that crowd scenes in such films contain only 17 percent female characters. Shockingly, the ration of male to female characters, according to the study, has stayed the same since 1946. (my bold)

...

First, Davis suggests, screenwriters should go through any project they're working on and change several of the characters' first names to women's names. "With one stroke," she writes, "you've created some colorful unstereotypical female characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they've had a gender switch." As she points out, why can't the two police officers responding to a house call be women?

Secondly, when setting up a crowd scene, Davis suggests that screenwriters simply write, "A crowd gathers, which is half female." It may seem a little bit forced, but when 83 percent of every crowd in fictional film towns across the world are men, it's worth reminding production teams that, yes, crowds can have women in them, too.

I think these two suggestions are simple, elegant, and doable. And it would definitely change perception - and since now, a crowd with 17% women is seen as equal, and that 17% is seen in so many statistics of how many women there are in different areas (Congress, military, Fortune 500 board members and so on) it seems like she's on to something.