The more things change in Hollywood – CGI, franchises based on toys and Taylor Lautner, movie star – the more things stay the same. Like the fact that women are poorly represented in front of the camera, and the situation is far worse behind it.
The LA Times reports a new study by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism uncovered some alarmingly consistent trends in the film industry:
In a survey of the top 100-grossing movies of 2009 — including “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,’ “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” – researchers found that 32.8% of the 4,342 speaking characters were female and 67.2% were male, a percentage identical to that of the top-grossing movies of 2008 …
.. Behind the camera, the gender inequality is just as dramatic: only 3.6% of the directors and 13.5% of the writers on the top-grossing films of 2009 were female, according to the study.