One of The New York Times’s most emailed articles this weekend, headlined “Madame C.E.O., Get Me a Coffee,” detailed what the authors called “the sad reality in workplaces around the world: Women help more but benefit less from it.”
Well, guess what, folks: the same is true in Hollywood and onscreen. The latest annual report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University found that not only has the number of top-grossing films with female protagonists dipped from last year, but that gender stereotypes continue to prevail in storylines.
Women made up 12 percent of the protagonists in the top films at the box office — led by “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1″ — down 3 percentage points from the year before.
According to the report, which compiled findings from an analysis of 2,300 characters in 2014’s 100 highest-grossing domestic films, female characters were more likely to support and help others, while male characters were more likely to commit crimes and get into fights.
Female characters in their 30s accounted for 30 percent of all characters, while female characters in their 40s made up just 17 percent. For men, however, the percentage of male characters in both their 30s and 40s stayed steady, accounting for about 27 percent of all characters.
“The chronic underrepresentation of girls and women reveals a kind of arrested development in the mainstream film industry,” Martha M. Lauzen, the center’s executive director, said in a statement that accompanied the report’s findings. “Women are not a niche audience and they are no more ‘risky’ as filmmakers than men. It is unfortunate that these beliefs continue to limit the industry’s relevance in today’s marketplace.”
Meanwhile, three out of four female characters in the most popular films were white, the report found, and the percentage of black and Latina female characters dipped from last year. The number of Asian female characters rose a teensy tiny bit to 4 percent, a 1 percentage point increase from last year.
The report also served up a clear solution to Hollywood’s gender imbalance: get more women behind the camera and writing scripts.
Ms. Lauzen and her team found that in films with at least one woman as a writer or director, women accounted for 39 percent of protagonists; in films with an all-male writing and directing teams, women accounted for just 4 percent of those lead roles.
A version of this article appears in print on 02/10/2015, on page C3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Film Study Finds Fewer Roles for Women.
