Women are everywhere so why are we invisible on film?
Women are everywhere so why are we invisible on film?
There are three male characters for every female one and women’s beauty is the story. Quotas are the way forward
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Geena Davis. Gender bias: kids’ films and TV shows children that girls are less important than boys, says Geena Davis. Photograph: REX Shutterstock
It was a symposium about gender so, of course, it was an audience of women. A vast auditorium of filmmakers, every seat filled, maybe 1% with male arses. The opposite proportion of the films.
This was one of the opening events of the BFI London Film Festival, the night after the Suffragette premiere where feminist activist group Sisters Uncut occupied the red carpet chanting: “Dead women can’t vote.” “I thought it was a publicity stunt,” chuckled the person next to me as Geena Davis came to the stage. That evening, in Chelsea, Tina Brown brought Meryl Streep, Queen Rania of Jordan and German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen together for her Women in the World summit. Tickets cost £200 each. Judging by the photos, the audience was primarily female, too.
Davis, her voice low and stretchy (whatever that means), reviewed the findings of the research institute she founded into women in the media. In kids’ films and TV there are three male characters for every female one. And, she claims, that shows children that girls are less important than boys. It creates a problem which the world has to deal with later. She talked about the surfeit of female characters in kids’ and adult media whose beauty is a storyline and the lack of female characters with jobs. Across 6,000 samples, 12 female characters were politicians, and of them, one was Angie, an elephant. At this revelation the room roared, then went completely silent.
Her institute is hoping to use the research to change how films are made. But it won’t be as easy as gathering a load of eager women in a room and sharing these numbers. Unconscious gender bias goes deeper than good intentions. Across 6,000 samples in kids’ and adult media, 12 females were politicians – and one of them was an elephant
She told a story. In the 80s, after a long effort to equal the gender composition of orchestras in the US, where they’d slowly increased the number of female musicians from 5% to 10%, they came upon the idea of “blind” auditions. If the panel, behind a curtain, couldn’t see who was playing, then they wouldn’t be able to discriminate. It worked! Sort of. The numbers of female musicians rose, but not significantly. Was some element revealing their gender and skewing the results? I’d love to have been in that room when they finally rasped: “Carpet the stage!” After the next round of auditions, Davis grinned, the orchestras were 50% women, because the panel had not been able to hear their heels.
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http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/tvandradioblog/2015/oct/18/women-are-everywhere-so-why-are-we-invisible-on-film-eva-wiseman
