Women in Hollywood Movies
Critical review plays an important role in American film, both anticipating and shaping audience preferences in popular culture. Many studies have used content analysis to examine the disproportionate gender depictions in film, only to find that women have been significantly underrepresented.
Over the last several years, the share of female protagonists in film has fluctuated, yet they still remain disproportionate to the U.S. population. Not only is there a lack in numerical representation, but female roles also present a lack of character development compared to their male counterparts.
In an article from FiveThirtyEight, “The Dollar-And-Cents Case Against Hollywood’s Exclusion of Women,” Walt Hickey uses the Bechdel Test in an attempt to dismiss the theory that films with strong female roles do not make as much money as films that are male-centric.
What is the Bechdel Test?
The Bechdel Test, which originated in 1985 from cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s comic strip “The Rule,” is a sequence of three questions designed to assess the presence of women in movies. To pass the Bechdel Test, a film must meet the following criteria:
1. The film must have at least two women with names.
2. Those named women must talk to each other, and in those conversations,
3. the women must talk about something other than a man.
The Data
Hickey’s study uses The Bechdel Test to analyze female roles in 1,794 movies released from 1970 to 2013. Using this sample of films, it was found that only half of the films had at least one scene where a female role conversed with another female about a topic not related to men. Why is this?
Does the appearance of females in films affect the films’ gross profits?
Graph 1 compares films that pass/fail the binary test, or Bechdel Test, to the films’ median international gross income. As shown, patriarchal films grossed over 20 million dollars more than the rest.
Though most research determines that females are underrepresented in film due to societal stereotypes, and men are given more screen and talk time and dynamic roles than women, this is not the only factor affecting the data.
In attempt to not be swayed by a visualization containing partial data, we must explore additional contributing factors. In doing so, it can be found that the data in its entirety does not support the theory that films featuring women do worse at the box office.
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From the start of production, films with strong female roles are not given the same opportunities as films that fail the binary test.
How does the appearance of females in film affect the films’ budget?
Since the early 1970s, films that passed the binary test had a much lower median budget than the films that failed the test. If a film is produced on a lower budget, it is reasonable to assume that the film will not perform as well with the audiences and therefore, not gross as much income as the films that spent more money in production.
To push this phenomenon further, we explored the budgets of all films in this sample, based on the category of female characters. The categories are as follows:
How does a film’s budget differ for films with female roles passing the Bechdel Test, films with female roles meeting the specified speaking criteria, and films with no female roles?
As shown in Graph 3, films with female characters who do not speak averaged the highest median budget, whereas films that passed the Bechdel Test had a much smaller budget.
In Hollywood, women are often underrepresented in speaking time in films. A study conducted by Google introduced a tool to examine a video on the gender of a character by exploring the length of time taken by every actor. The study established that women were given 36% of the time on screen and only 35% of them were in well-paying films.
Although a numerical representation of women offers an essential baseline, not all lines, roles, or screen time are significant to a movie (Fogel & Criscione, 2020). The quality of representation determines whether the character is sophisticated or portrayed as stereotypical (Carraway, 2020).
Why it matters: Cultivation Theory
Cultivation theory was developed by Professor George Gerbner in 1960 as a tool to explore the impact of television on viewers. According to Gerbner, viewers who are exposed to media portray the lessons in real life. For instance, if the media presents women as lesser humans and sex objects, people will project such behaviors in real life.
Another example of the theory’s application is the ability of television to homogenize and stabilize views within society. Gerbner argues that the children who are exposed to the television exhibit stereotypical sex views of women, unlike others. The underrepresentation of females in society has even resulted in biases in the workplace and mistreatment in marriages.
Generally speaking, cultivation theory is relevant in the film industry, where women are portrayed in static roles. The issue has affected the overall perception of women in society, thus proving the applicability and validity of the cultivation theory in today’s society.
View the visualization dashboard here.
Report by Isabella Pennese and Haneenalqawasmeh
