LA Press Club Screening: This Changes Everything by Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

 

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media is a partner in the new documentary: “This Changes Everything,” about how everything has not changed.  “It paints an impressively full picture of how Hollywood’s gender imbalance is sustained and also how it reverberates throughout the culture.”

"This Changes Everything:" Screening and Panel at LA Press Club
“This Changes Everything:” Screening and Panel at LA Press Club. Photo by Curtis Sabir

Thank you to the Los Angeles Press Club for the screening and panel discussion.

This Changes Everything PROGRAM from Los Angeles Press Club on Vimeo.

“The new documentary film, This Changes Everything, about the struggles women face in the film industry, is the subject of a great panel discussion. Panelists include: Geena Davis, Catherine Hardwicke, Kimberly Peirce and the film’s director Tom Donahue. Moderated by Devra Maza.”

Lisa Niver at LA Press Club event Geena Davis Screening
LA Press Club event: Screening “This Changes Everything” Photo by Curtis Sabir with Amy Goldstein, Anouchka van Riel and Lisa Niver

More from THE GEENA DAVIS INSTITUTE ON GENDER and MEDIA:
If women and girls don’t see themselves on screen as STEM professionals, they’re less likely to pursue those career paths.”-Geena Davis

In the U.S., only 24% of professionals in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are women. Increasing media depictions of women in STEM encourages more girls and women to pursue STEM jobs in the real world. You hold the key to inspiring future visionaries and innovators.

Seejane.org If She Can See It, She Can Be It

 

 

IF SHE CAN SEE IT, SHE CAN BE IT

The Geena Benchmark Report: 2007-2017

MAJOR FINDINGS

The purpose of this study is to establish benchmark measures for the percentage of protagonists who are women, people of color, LGBTQIA, and people with disabilities in family films, so that we can quantify progress over time.

  • Male leads outnumber female leads
    TWO-TO-ONE
    although this has improved slightly in the last decade
  • Family films with female leads closed the gap in domestic box office revenue over the past decade and now earn more than family films with male leads
  • When it comes to race, white leads outnumber leads of color
    FOUR-TO-ONE
  • Box office revenue for family films with leads of color and racially diverse co-leading casts have caught up with and surpassed family films with white leads
  • FEWER THAN 1%
    of family films feature a LGBTQIA lead, and we have seen no progress in the past decade
  • FEWER THAN 1%
    of family films feature a lead with a disability, and this has not improved in the past decade

WOMEN LEADS

Women constitute 51% of the U.S. population,1but most family films tell the stories of men’s lives:

  • Male leads vastly outnumber female leads—71.3% compared to 28.8%. This means that men’s stories were featured twice as often as women’s stories.
  • Female leads are the least represented in the action (9.4%), adventure (23.6%), and comedy (28.7%) genres. However, women are equitably represented in horror (55.9%) and romance (46.3%) films.
  • We see fluctuations in women’s representation from 2007 to 2017, but the trend is upward, meaning that more women were cast in leading roles by the end of the decade than the start of the decade. In 2007, 23.8% of leads were women compared to 30.1% in 2017, with a high of 33.3% in 2016 (Chart 1).

Previous studies find that women represent half of the film-going population,2 and that gender diversity on screen translates into higher revenues at the box office.3 We find that the gender diversity bonus at the box office is a relatively recent phenomenon:

  • The amount of money female-led films make has increased over the last decade. In 2007, female-led films grossed an average of $44.3 million, and in 2017, they grossed an average of $80.1 million (Chart 2).
  • Family films with female leads caught up with and surpassed films with male leads in the past decade. A decade ago, family films with male leads earned significantly more revenue than films with female leads, but this reversed by 2016 when female leads grossed $94.3 million compared to $88.0 million for male leads. In 2017, female leads surpassed male leads again— $80.1 million compared to $78.4 million.

We recommend the following actions to move the needle on lead representations:

• Diversify hiring in film production. Diversity in writing rooms and throughout the creative process translates into more diversity on the screen,11 so the problem with representation starts with inequitable hiring decisions. Hiring practices in the film industry have seen no improvement in the last two decades.12 Studios must truly commit to anti-discrimination in their hiring practices, and set goals to diversify their workforce.

• Commit distribution and marketing resources equally. Another foundational problem with representation on the screen is that films directed by women do not receive the same distribution and marketing resources as films directed by men.13 Despite this, films written, directed, or starring women enjoy a greater average return on investment. Studios must commit to making more family films about the lives of women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, and people with disabilities, and ensure that these films reach the widest audience possible by equitably promoting them.

• Tell stories that reflect the real world. Studios could make the representations in family films equitable overnight by making sure that the worlds they are re-creating in family films look like the real world in terms of whose stories are told. Is it especially important to have diversity with leading characters since plotlines and narratives revolve around their stories.

Women in STEM

Geena Davis Infographic

 

RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on previous research coupled with our findings, we propose the following interventions to increase the participation of girls and women in STEM majors and careers:

  • Improve media representations of STEM characters when it comes to gender and race. This study demonstrates that media is influential in shaping attitudes toward STEM, but content producers continue to disproportionately represent STEM characters as white men, especially leading characters. Special attention should be paid to increase the representation of women and people of color as STEM characters, and to improve the ways women STEM characters are portrayed.
  • Cultivate girls’ interest in math and science from an early age through media role models, parents, educators, and mentors. Having supportive mentors, teachers, friends, and family members improves girls’ interest in and intention to pursue STEM.
  • Implement early childhood interventions to combat stereotypes about science as a pursuit for men, and cultural misperceptions that girls and women have a lower aptitude for STEM.
  • Retain women in STEM through equitable hiring, pay, and promotion practices, and by addressing workplace bias (gender discrimination and sexual harassment) as well as implementing flexible work-family policies.

Lisa Ellen Niver

Lisa Ellen Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries and six continents. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she worked on cruise ships for seven years and backpacked for three years in Asia. She is the founder of the website WeSaidGoTravel which is read in 235 countries and was named #3 on Rise Global’s top 1,000 Travel Blogs. Niver is a speaker at the Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Dallas Travel and Adventure Shows for 2023. Her podcast, “Make Your Own Map,” has been watched in more than 11 countries on 4 continents. Niver is represented by Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary, Inc. Look for her memoir in Fall 2023 from Post Hill Press/Simon and Schuster. You can find Lisa Niver talking travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, Satellite Media Tours, The Jet Set TV and Orbitz travel webisodes as well as her YouTube channel, where her WeSaidGoTravel videos have nearly 2 million views. With more than 150,000 followers across social media, she has hosted Facebook Live for USA Today 10best, is verified on Twitter and listed on IMDb, and is the Social Media Manager for the Los Angeles Press Club. As a journalist, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors and been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. She has been a judge for the Gracie Awards for the Alliance of Women in Media, and has run 15 travel competitions on her website, publishing over 2,500 writers and photographers from 75 countries. For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and been a finalist twenty times.   Niver has published more than 2000 articles, in more than three dozen magazines and journals including National Geographic, Wired, Teen Vogue, HuffPost Personal, POPSUGAR, Ms. Magazine, Luxury Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Club, Saturday Evening Post, AARP, AAA Explorer Magazine, American Airways, Delta Sky, enRoute (Air Canada), Hemispheres, Jewish Journal, Myanmar Times, BuzzFeed, Robb Report, Scuba Diver Life, Ski Utah, Trivago, Undomesticated, USA Today, TODAY, Wharton Magazine, and Yahoo. https://bit.ly/m/lisaniver Awards National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards 2021 Winner: Book Critic: Ms. Magazine “Untamed: Brave Means Living From the Inside Out” 2019 Winner: Soft News Feature for Film/TV: KTLA TV “Oscars Countdown to Gold with Lisa Niver” 2019 Finalist for: Soft News, Business/Music/Tech/Art Southern California Journalism Awards 2022 Finalist: Book Criticism 2021 Winner: Technology Reporting 2021 Finalist: Book Criticism 2020 Winner: Print Magazine Feature: Hemispheres Magazine, “Painter by the Numbers, Rembrandt” 2020 Finalist: Online Journalist of the Year, Activism Journalism, Educational Reporting, Broadcast Lifestyle Feature 2019 Finalist: Broadcast Television Lifestyle Segment for “Ogden Ski Getaway” 2018 Finalist: Science/Technology Reporting, Travel Reporting, Personality Profile 2017 Winner: Print Column “A Journey to Freedom over Three Passovers” Social Media Presence YouTube Channel: We Said Go Travel (1.7 million views) Short form video:TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts Twitter: lisaniver (90,000 followers) Instagram: lisaniver (24,000 followers) Pinterest: We Said Go Travel (20,000 followers and over 70,000 monthly views) Facebook: lisa.niver (5,000 followers); We Said Go Travel (3,000 followers) LinkedIn: lisaellenniver (9000 contacts)

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