We are still stuck in "la la land," as Jay Z might suggest.
A new study from USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab titled "How Central are Female Characters to a Movie?" confirms what we already knew: white men are still hogging up way too much time both in front of the screen and behind it.
The study found that there were seven times more male writers than female writers, almost twelve times more male directors than female directors, and a little over three times more male producers than female producers. Female characters also were on average five years younger than their male counterparts. When women wrote the scripts, the amount of female characters increased by 50%.
The researchers over at USC analyzed nearly 1,000 scripts from The Daily Script and IMSDb. They also found that men portrayed around 4,900 characters while women only portrayed about 2,000. Men had over 37,000 dialogues while women had about 15,000. To top it off, the scripts were also riddled with stereotypes.
When it came to race, things weren't any better: Latino and mixed race persons were much more likely to have dialogue related to sexuality, while African-Americans' scripts included a higher percentage of swear words.
This is all despite studies, such as one from UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, that show that movies where the cast is less than half white make considerably more money than their paler counterparts.
In 2016, the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism released a similar study concluding that Hollywood is still dominated by white men. That study found that out of one hundred films, only 14 had a lead or co-lead who wasn't white. Of those 14, only three were women—and not even one, of any gender, was Asian.
So yeah, in conclusion: the Oscars, films, Hollywood, the whole thing remains very white and very male.
