Fargo (1995)
Today
Unfortunately, although women in today's society enjoy more respect and independence than ever, they still can't seem to get treated with the same degree of respect in films and the film industry as men do. According to researchers at the University of Southern California, of the top 100 highest-grossing movies of 2008, men had approximately double the number of speaking roles that women did, leaving the number of gender-balanced films at less than seventeen percent, despite half of the moviegoing audience being female. As if this wasn't enough of a disparagement, the researchers also found that women were, on average, four times as likely as men to be shown partially nude or wearing provocative clothing.
What's more, age was found to be a major factor in determining how women would be portrayed onscreen, with a proportional relationship found between how young an actress was and the likelihood that she would be shown as attractive. Older women were less likely to be shown at all, with less than a quarter of characters aged 40-64 being female.
Here are some graphs that show the exact numbers found by the USC study.
What's more, age was found to be a major factor in determining how women would be portrayed onscreen, with a proportional relationship found between how young an actress was and the likelihood that she would be shown as attractive. Older women were less likely to be shown at all, with less than a quarter of characters aged 40-64 being female.
Here are some graphs that show the exact numbers found by the USC study.
When you consider the contractually obligated shirt-doffing of the male stars of the Twilight franchise, the disparity in these numbers is especially remarkable.
Why?
Sadly, despite all the progress that women have made since the dawn of cinema, the reasons that women are exploited in movies today are roughly the same reasons that they were nearly a century ago. There are more female film directors today than there have ever been, but women are still as underrepresented behind the camera as they are in front of it. The USC study found that although the presence of one or more female writers involved in a film production increases female presence onscreen by ten percent, only thirteen percent of screenwriters are female. These numbers have been roughly the same for the past three years. With numbers like that, it's no wonder today's films are made from an almost entirely male perspective.